Diamond dominates PL logging

Editor’s note: This is the third of five stories following the Priest Lake Museum’s Heritage Series, as well as the museum itself. The series details the history of Priest Lake, which has documented the early history of logging in Priest Lake, the history of Hill’s Resort, and continues with “Get Lit: Diamond Match Company.”

By MARY MALONE

Staff writer

COOLIN — In the early days of match making, companies used white phosphorus. The use of such a chemical, of course, made them poisonous and ailed people with a disease that was commonly known as “phossy jaw.”

It wasn’t until after 1910 that the Diamond Match Company formulated a match that was not poisonous. They also began using “safety match” technology, meaning the match would only ignite when struck against a prepared surface on the match box.

As the oldest and largest match company in the United States, Diamond Match dominated the industry.

“Like a lot of these big, Gilded Age companies, they just bought up everybody else — bought up all of their competitors,” said local historian Kris Runberg Smith. “So by 1880, they are the big company on the block.”

The Diamond Match Company and its history in Priest Lake was the third installment of the Priest Lake Heritage Series, a four-part event hosted by the Priest Lake Museum. The series, which began two weeks ago with the early history of logging in Priest Lake, continued with the history of Hill’s Resort and last Wednesday, the Diamond Match Company.

Smith said it was when the company realized western white pine would be a suitable replacement for the diminishing eastern yellow pine that the Diamond Match Company took up residence in Priest Lake.

Prior to 1920, Diamond contracted with local loggers, such as Smith’s great-grandfather C.W. Beardmore, to purchase the white pine. Before the end of the war, however, the company began using third parties to buy up land around Priest Lake. Smith said they would soon “show their face” in 1920, purchasing 25,000 acres from the state of Idaho on the east side of Priest Lake.

“This really alarms a lot of folks,” Smith said. “They fear that Diamond is in the back pocket of the state and the state is just going to sell all the land at a good price. So there was a lot of controversy about that.”

The company also used third parties to buy up some of the mills in the area, particularly mills along the Pend Oreille River, north of Newport. It was in that area that Diamond City emerged. Diamond City was a company town with a large mill, Smith said, but they had to get across land that belonged to other mills to get to the Pend Oreille from Diamond City. So they created a tramway to get the logs over the other companies’ properties. The footings for the structure can still be seen today, Smith said.

The white pine logged from Priest Lake mainly went to Diamond’s plant in Ohio where the matches were made, Smith said.

There were still some other large logging companies in the area in 1920, she said, including Dalkena and Beardmore. Diamond, therefore, was not the largest logging company, though it did have three of the largest logging camps in the area. The company also had one of the largest log flumes, located at Big Creek. In 1926, Diamond purchased a “huge” amount of Northern Pacific Railroad land on the west side of Priest Lake in the Kalispell Creek drainage. That summer, however, was a hot, dry year. After one night of thunder storms on July 5, 1926, 65 fires burned in the area. A week later, 150 fires were started due to the thunderstorms, and much of the land in the Kalispell area was burned, Smith said.

“The Forest Service was really nervous that Diamond Match was just going to write off their losses and walk away from that, and they don’t want that to happen,” Smith said. “Partly because a lot of this wood could start on fire again; partly because if they are going to salvage it, they’ve got to get in there quickly before it rots; and partly because, for the Forest Service, they see this as, ‘We clear it out and we can have a giant white pine plantation — a whole forest that is just white pine.”

The Forest Service, then cut Diamond a “really great deal,” she said, to go in and salvage not only the Diamond Match land, but also the surrounding Forest Service land. To do that, they needed to build a 17-mile railroad in the Kalispell drainage area. Two diesel locomotives were purchased as the Forest Service would not allow them to have steam engines due to fire concerns.

Crews pulled 24 logging car loads a day into Kalispell Bay, where the logs would remain until they could be sent down the Priest River in the spring, Smith said.

By 1929, other local logging companies began to feel the effects of the Great Depression, many of them going bankrupt. Diamond Match took advantage of the opportunity, and the biggest “coup” for Diamond, Smith said, was when it purchased the Humbird Mill east of Newport in 1935.

“So with the Depression, (Diamond) has taken over all of the competition and they have a monopoly in this region,” Smith said. “In fact, they have so much of a monopoly that in 1940, they are sued for price fixing and playing with production records.”

The company continued to expand with the use of technology, such as the improvement of chainsaws and the building of roads, though Smith said they continued to use horses through the 1950s. Diamond bought the mill at Outlet Bay, the Priest Lake Lumber Company, in 1947. As the network of roads continued to grow, Diamond closed all of its camps in 1956 as they were no longer needed.

Before handing it over to audience members who were around during the Diamond Match years, Smith spoke briefly about the log drives on the Priest River, which Diamond had taken over in 1931 and continued until the last log drive in 1949.

“It usually took them about 40 days to get those logs down the river, working about seven days a week,” Smith said.

A man named Dr. Edward Bond filmed some of the log drives, a portion of which Smith showed the audience. This was followed by a first-hand account of the man’s son, Bob Bond, who was in the audience. Bob Bond said he was with his dad during some of the filming when he was a child. As a doctor, his dad was also contracted with Diamond to provide medical care to employees.

“Diamond paid my dad $2 a month for each employee,” Bond said. “My dad took care of them for that, plus paid their hospital bill if they had to go to the hospital. And he had a contract with the Newport Hospital for $2.50 a day for all his patients that went into the hospital. So prices were a bit different than they are today.”

Diamond is still “sort of” in existence, Smith said, though it has been bought out several times over, and she can not find any official records.

“So it’s really sort or reminiscences and those sorts of things that help us put together this picture of Diamond at Priest Lake,” Smith said.

The final installment of the Priest Lake Heritage Series takes place at 7 p.m. tonight, Aug. 1, at the Priest Lake Library with the history of Elkin’s Resort, hosted by Bob Davis.

Mary Malone can be reached by email at mmalone@bonnercountydailybee.com and follow her on Twitter @MaryDailyBee.