Rainier Oregon Historical Museum
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The Case Mill
Compiled by Mike Clark

The Case Mill, as depicted on the postcard published by Sprouse & Son, sat next to Nice Creek in an area just south of the present Nice Creek Bridge (W C Street). The photo of the mill was taken from the bridge looking south. The bridge at that time was wooden, later replaced in 1911 with a concrete structure. Per the booklet "Early Rainier" by the Mullins Family, the Case Mill operated from 1906 until 1911. The same postcard in the booklet as shown here, was hand dated 1908.

This postcard, also published by Sprouse & Son, shows the backside of Case Mill and the log pond. Written on the reverse side of the postcard, "This is how the mill here will get its logs when it starts up again. The car is loaded with logs in the woods and comes down hill to the mill itself and is hauled back with an engine and cable. The pond here is not so large as the one in the picture. There was two men drowned in it three years ago."

Per the March 31, 1922 issue of the Rainier (Oregon) Review, the Case Mill was destroyed by a fire on March 29.
Image
Description
A closeup detail of the Case Mill from a Rainier illustration printed in about 1909.
A photo (taken in July 2013) from the Nice Creek Bridge looking south in the direction where the Case Mill once stood.
This image is looking north. The clearing just south of the Nice Creek Bridge was where the Case Mill once stood. For a number of years a house once stood where the mill had been. It later was abandoned and torn down (From Google maps March 26, 2018).

Comments

When I was a teenager in the 1960s, I walked downstream along Nice Creek. A few hundred feet above where the mill stood I found a small waterfall. At the base of the falls were several rotting logs scattered as if someone had dropped a handfull of pick-up sticks. An oldtimer later told me that a load of logs heading for the mill had fallen from one of the railroad cars and they deemed it too much trouble to recover them. Mike Clark, March 26, 2018.

Postcards and illustration from the Mike Clark collection.
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Contact me at Clarkmikew@aol.com for any questions

Copyright 2018