A forklift motors around the Prairie Wood Products yard on Thursday, July 14, 2022.

Prairie City residents woke up last week to a sound they had not heard in years.

A working sawmill.

The Prairie Wood Products sawmill officially reopened on Monday, July 11, for its first full day of operations.

The D.R. Johnson Lumber Co. announced last month that it intended to reopen the mill, which was shuttered 15 years ago. To staff the operation, the company hosted a two-day job fair at Chester’s Thriftway in John Day.

Plant manager Tom Moore said the mill hired roughly 25 people. He said once the planer is up and running, he would be looking to hire between 15 and 20 more employees.

Prairie Wood Products President Jodi Westbrooks said the company was happy to be able to hire the staff needed to get the mill running again.

“They are working hard,” she said. “I’ve been in the mill watching them go as hard as they can.”

Westbrooks said there are some kinks the sawmill has to work out with the old equipment. But all in all, she said, things are running smoothly at the mill.

“It is going,” she said, “and we are thrilled.”

Moore, who used to work for the DR Johnson-owned Grant Western sawmill in John Day, told the Eagle that the mill’s mothballed cogeneration plant has some issues that must be worked through before it can be fired up again.

Craig Trulock, Malheur National Forest supervisor, told the newspaper last month that the cogeneration plant could provide a way to remove biomass from the forest. Currently, he said, there is no market for that material.

The biomass, which consists of small logs, branches and bushes that would otherwise get burned up in the forest or left on the ground, could be ground and burned in the cogeneration plant to generate heat and electricity, Trulock said.

Westbrooks said the company plans to get its timber supply from a combination of public and private lands and will purchase logs from independent loggers and landowners.

Brett Morris, the owner of Morris Forestry, said in a Friday, July 15, interview that he had already delivered nine loads of logs to the sawmill.

“(Prairie Wood) is really cranking up production,” he said.

Morris said he works as an independent logger in the spring, but during fire season he works as a wildland firefighter with his logging equipment, which makes him good money. With Prairie Wood open, he said he would be running his logging company during fire season.

In the long term, he said running his business would be better for him and his family.

“My family will appreciate that I won’t be gone for two to three months in the summertime,” Morris said.

Morris said his company had been about a month behind schedule with the late spring rain, but things are going well now.

He said if the mill had not been open in Prairie City, he would have had to haul logs to Elgin or Pilot Rock for milling. With rising fuel costs, there would have been a good chance he would not have been able to operate.

“My little company couldn’t afford to haul (logs) that far with the way fuel is right now.”

Having the mill open benefits local private landowners with respect to fuel reduction and removing wildfire risks, Morris added.

While Prairie Wood hopes to collaborate with the Malheur National Forest and other public agencies on forest restoration projects, Moore said the mill has primarily been working with private landowners so far.

He said the company hopes to build other relationships going forward.

Moore said he could not say how many board feet of timber the mill plans to process because it is in its “infancy stages.”

Nonetheless, Moore — who worked for Malhuer Lumber before coming to Prairie Wood Products — said that reopening the mill has been a great feeling.

“It is not every day,” he said, “that you get to bring something back from the dead.”

The Prairie City mill was purchased by the D.R. Johnson Lumber Co. in 1976. Two years later, the family-owned company added a stud mill and planer. Then, in the late 1980s, the company installed a cogeneration power plant.

The sawmill, which operated successfully in Prairie City for more than 30 years and employed upwards of 100 people who worked two different shifts, shuttered in 2008 amid a housing market crash that led to a lack of available sawlogs.

D.R. Johnson restarted the mill in early 2009 but shut it down permanently by the end of the year. The cleanup of the mill, which sits at the west end of Prairie City, concluded in 2019.

Since then, much of the mill equipment has remained on site, along with the co-gen plant.