FORTINE, MONTANA – The 54-year old Ksanka sawmill is silent this morning for the first time since Dwight Eisenhower was President of the United States. The mill, which has been owned by the Plum Creek Timber Company since 1971, was founded by pioneer lumberman, Jim Hurst, Sr. in 1955. Its 74 workers are out of jobs – many of them for the first time in their lives.

Plum Creek announced two months ago that it would permanently close the mill on March 20, leaving remote Lincoln County – the most heavily forested county in Montana – without a sawmill for the first time in more than 100 years. Ksanka becomes the twenty-first Montana mill to shut down since 1990. More than 2,000 mill workers have lost their jobs since now long-gone Champion International shuttered its Missoula property in 1990.

The Fortine mill occupied a special place in the hearts of many northwest Montana residents, for no particular reason other than the fact that hardly anyone here can remember when it wasn’t a beehive of activity along Highway 93 about half-way between Whitefish and Eureka, another sawmill town that lost its last mill in 2005. That mill belonged to Jim Hurst Jr. and his partner, the late Lum Owens.

On Friday, Mr. Hurst seemed to speak for everyone in Fortine, if not all of northwest Montana. “Here you have the most timbered county in Montana without a significant mill,” he told Daily Inter Lake reporter, Jim Mann. “If anybody in the state had staying power, it would have been Plum Creek. I would have really hoped that they had an extra effort to keep that mill open because, number one, the workers, and number two, there are quite a few trees left on private timberland.”

True enough, but Plum Creek’s Montana vice president, Tom Ray, said the collapse of the U.S. housing market has crushed the Ksanka stud mill. He reported the mill lost $40 million last year. But its loss will make it more costly for small private timberland owners in this remote region to truck their logs to market. Now the closest mills are in Columbia Falls, Montana and Bonners Ferry, Idaho, a six-hour haul from most timberland ownerships in the Fortine and Eureka areas.

Even the Forest Service, which owns 75 percent of Lincoln County’s land base, seemed dismayed by the Ksanka closure. Kootenai National Forest Supervisor, Paul Bradford, fretted about the loss in sawmilling infrastructure in recent years.

“It does concern me when I’m heading back on U.S. 2 to Libby and there’s a string of long trucks heading somewhere else, and it’s the same on the north end of the country, too.” Yet despite Mr. Bradford’s concern, the Forest Service has not been able to sell enough of its dying timber to sustain even a single sawmill in the county.

Before the Stimson Lumber Company shut down its Libby operation in 2002, it asked the Forest Service if it could guarantee the sale of 14 million board feet annually. If it could, company spokesmen promised to keep the mill running. But no such guarantees were forthcoming from the federal government, so Stimson was forced to close the mill and 300 workers lost their jobs. Meanwhile, insect and disease infestations are killing about 100 million feet of timber annually on the Kootenai– an amount sufficient to supply every family-owned sawmill in Montana.