History Of Montana Operation Stoltze Is Classic Stuff

Article by Rich Donnell, Editor-In-Chief, Timber Processing September 2015

One of the feature stories in this issue is the F.H. Stoltze Land & Lumber sawmill operation in Columbia Falls, Montana. Our senior associate editor, David Abbott, visited the sawmill as well as the cogeneration plant that started up two years ago.

What struck me early in David’s article was that a sawmill had been on site since 1923—as in 92 years.

My experience with the F.H. Stoltze business dates back to late 1987, when I visited the company’s new sawmill at the time, called Stoltze-Conner, in Darby, Mont. I met with Rem Kohrt and Royce Satterlee, who were both extremely proud of the new mill, the flow of which they had sketched on the back of a napkin while attending the Portland machinery show. Timber supply issues encouraged Stoltze to sell the Darby mill in 1993.

Timber access, or the lack thereof on federal government timberlands, was a problem back then, and if you read David’s article beginning on page 16, it remains a problem today for the Stoltze operation at Columbia Falls. But that’s getting away from what initially piqued my interest in David’s story, the longevity of Stoltze. Who was F. H. Stoltze anyway?

Born in Wisconsin, and beginning his business career in St. Paul, Minn., Stoltze became associates with railroad man James Hill and built general stores and towns for Hill as the Great Northern Railroad stretched west into northwest Montana. Stoltze also partnered in the formation of Enterprise Lumber to build a mill west of Kalispell that provided ties and lumber to the railroad. And he formed another mill in the area called Empire Lumber.

Some years before, in 1912, as Stoltze gained more and more timber leases, he formed F.H. Stoltze Land Co.

The current Columbia Falls sawmill has its roots as State Lumber Co., which operated a sawmill on the Whitefish River. Stoltze apparently held interests in State Lumber as well when it shut down in 1918 and had many of its buildings moved to Halfmoon (the current mill is on Halfmoon Road). A new bunkhouse and cookhouse were built and at one time there were 32 company owned homes at Halfmoon.

Construction of the sawmill at Halfmoon took five years with the first logs sawn in May 1923. State Lumber contracted with F.W. Horstkotte to build the mill with a capacity of 100MBF in an eight-hour shift for $225,000. Much of the equipment came from other mills. The mill employed about 100. Production at the planer mill began in summer 1924. Five boilers were installed, fueled by wood waste, and a waste burner, possibly the first in Montana, was installed in 1926.

In 1933 State Lumber Co. was reorganized as F.H. Stoltze Land and Lumber Co., listing Halfmoon as its place of business. By then F.H. Stoltze had died at age 62 (in 1928) after failing health. His son, John Stoltze, who had been in the oil business in Louisiana, took over the lumber business, eventually assisted by son-in-law Dan O’Brien III. John Stoltze died in 1991. O’Brien passed away in 2012, and as recently as this summer his wife, one of F.H. Stoltze’s granddaughters and board member, Sallie, died at 85. Family members remain as the current owners of the company, which the company proudly proclaims on its website as the oldest family owned lumber company in Montana.

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