West Linn has been a mill town longer than it has been a city.  The mill in West Linn, on the west side of mighty Willamette Falls, manufactured its first paper in 1895 and has employed more than five generations of workers since then.   

The grindstones were run inside huge cast housings, under pressure, with pulpwood chunks being pressed into their surfaces, which were sharpened by the millwrights until it was time to send the huge stones back for repair or to install new stones.  

Each workstation had more than one opening to keep supplied with the heavy, wet wood (possibly more than 100 pounds per chunk), and a pointed rod called a tattletale sank into the housing as the wood supply ran low, prompting the millworkers to fill it. Indoor flumes carried floating wood from the giant saws of the adjacent sawmill, where B-grade logs were hauled from their years of storage as rafts along the riverbanks and reduced to the size that could be handled and tossed into the grinders.

The Groundwood portion of the mill’s operation has been shut down for more than a decade and the old machinery that ground up trees for paper pulp in Mill A is now long silent.  The mill today still employs 250 people and is the city’s largest industrial employer. Today the mill receives prepared, dried pulp, which it reconstitutes and transforms into high quality coated papers, shipping more than 600 tons of paper each day to customers across the U.S. and beyond.

In 2006, in honor of the more than a century of millwork that essentially built the older neighborhoods of the city and educated and created their middle and professional classes, Willamette Falls Heritage Foundation, a small West Linn non-profit, collected more than 30 hours of oral history interviews with 17 former mill workers from the West Linn mill.

The people who did grueling shiftwork in the grinding rooms, where the pulping stones had to be fed 24 hours a day, tell stories of the old days, of working in rubber boots, feet always wet anyway, and—in season—having salmon and lamprey eel come up through the drains in the floor and swim around their feet.

Here, from the documentary “Grindstones, Boomsticks, Tattletales and Nips”, about Crown Zellerbach, West Linn,  from 1928-1986, are stories from and about the men who fed the grindstones.

>> When I went to work at the mill there, there was over 2,000 people working there.    Ed

>> When I first became aware, I think there were 1,400-and-something employees there.  Of course, we ended up with a lot fewer than that.  I mean, as the machines kept shutting down and shutting down.      Roy

>> We had two types of pulping down there.  One was the ground wood where they put these big blocks of wood against the stone and actually ground the wood into a paste, more or less.

>> First day I started there, I went right down to the grinder room, and it didn't take much instruction to learn how to pile wood.     Bob

>> I went to work in the grinder room on July 10, 1947. And it was a job, piling wood for the number 25 line up there. The first three days I worked there, I brought my lunch home. I never had time to eat it.      George

>> At the time that I first started there, they was running primarily white fir and spruce.  Once in a while, we'd get a little cottonwood or something like that in there, which stunk like bad fish.  And hemlock, lots and lots of hemlock, too. That made a man out of you because it was so stinking heavy.

      Now, spruce, that was a real snap; if you had enough seniority to get on the spruce line, you loved that because it was like lifting a block of lead and then going to a pillow. If they wanted to brighten the pulp, they ran more spruce because it was a whiter wood.     Bob

>> When I was piling wood, I always liked to get spruce.  It had a lot of pitch on it, but when you piled that on the cart and took it over, it took forever for it to grind for some reason.  But now, fir, it just melted through there.     George

>> My boys worked there, and they started in ground wood, and they loved it because they'd work really hard, and they'd fill the carts, and then they could go out and sit on the veranda and watch them fish.      Mary G.

>> Yeah, you kept the pockets under pressure with wood in them, and you did that for eight hours, and you ate whenever you wanted to eat, and -- and nobody bothered you.   

>> They had tattletales on the grinder, and when you throwed the wood into the cylinders and closed the door, well, the tattletale'd come down when you pulled the lever to push it down against the wood. And yeah, it kept you busy. You just had to keep up with the machines.     Bob

>> Those stones were made of carborundum, and they weighed -- oh, I think the whole setup with the shaft and all were between 4,000 and 8,000 pounds.   

>> They were expensive stones. They'd refill them as much as they could. They had a core, and they would send them in -- it was a Norton stone; they'd send them to Norton someplace, and they would refurbish them.  The stones were put in there like brickwork, and they were cemented in some way. It was a big, round cylinder; it was about five feet in diameter. Millwrights would have to change them.  It was a little bit of a chore because the stones weighed several tons.       George

>>  Well, a jigging burr was possibly diamond-impregnated or something. You know, it was real hard, and it cut grooves in those (grind)stones. They would run that across and actually put cutting edges on those stones.

>> But, boy, I looked down there and -- where the grinders were, and I thought to myself, "Boy, that's one place I don't ever want to work."   john

>> Actually, putting those pieces of wood, feeding those grinders -- I mean, I never did that.  Never got assigned that, and I was thankful. That was quite a job.   Roy

>>Some of those guys worked it their whole life down there, and it didn't seem to bother them, but it did me.       Del

>> God, it's like the grinder room, you know -- that wasn't an easy job, and in some ways I'm sad to see it go, but in other ways I'm glad that there's young people that doesn't have to do that work right now.  When they get to complaining on the jobs nowadays, I get a big kick out of them. I say, "You young people don't know what work was."   Bob

>> That reminds me of something.  A guy came and got a job. They gave him boots, and they gave him a hardhat and everything, took him down there, and he worked there that day.  When he left, he took everything-- All that stuff they gave him -- and left.  He never did come back.        

>> We had one fella came in there one time, I can remember, he was bragging about all of his work that he'd done in an aircraft factory, and he wasn't afraid to work at all.  Of course, number-two grinder room was so foggy, you couldn't see from one end to the next. I mean, just the steam from everything, you know, and so much humidity there.  And he worked down there for about an hour, and then he came along and I heard him ask one of the guys---he said, "Where's those stairs I came down?"  They told him, and he shook his head, and he said, “A man would sure have to love a woman to work down here," and I never saw him again.    George  [ chuckling ]