Rockport Redwood Company.

Corporate History

Rockport Redwood Company was one of many lumber interests owned by the business empire of Ralph M. Rounds of Wichita, Kansas. In 1937, he took a lease to operate, with option to buy, the Cottoneva Redwood Company, a California firm incorporated in 1933; it was renamed Rockport Redwood Company in 1941, when Rounds exercised the purchase option. The operations consisted of a sawmill and townsite at Rockport, California, 200 miles north of San Francisco, and about 40,000 acres of timber lands nearby.

The first sawmill at the site was built by William R. Miller in 1877. Upon his retirement, in 1886, Miller sold the mill and his landholdings to the newly organized Cottoneva Lumber Company. They improved and operated the facilities at Rockport until the mill was destroyed by fire in 1900. It was not rebuilt and the manufacture of lumber was discontinued. Sometime after 1907, Cottoneva was acquired by the Dusenbury family, operators of nearby mill until 1912, when it burned. Cottoneva Lumber Company was incorporated in 1910 and became the successor to the Dusenbury's New York and Pennsylvania Redwood Company. Their plans for a new mill and operations at Rockport were never realized and Rockport remained quiet until 1925, when the assets of Cottoneva Lumber Company were acquired by the newly formed Finkbine-Guild Lumber Company of Jackson, Mississippi. Their operations at Rockport were a financial disaster and abandoned in 1927. Their assets were acquired in 1928 by the Great Southern Lumber Company of Bogolusa, Louisiana, which merged with it to form the Southern Redwood Company; their operations also failed and were shutdown in 1929. The Dusenbury family and other bondholders foreclosed on the defaulted bonds of the Finkbine-Guild Lumber Company and, in 1933, chartered the Cottoneva Redwood Company.

In 1945 Rounds Lumber Company was incorporated in California, with offices in San Francisco, as the sole wholesale outlet of lumber milled by the Rockport Redwood Company. Rounds & Kilpatrick Lumber Company built and began operating a lumber drying and remanufacturing plant in Cloverdale, California in 1948. Until 1957, the role of Rockport Redwood Company was to supply rough green lumber from its timberlands to this plant, for processing into finished lumber for retail sales. Rounds & Porter, Inc., of California, was an extension of the parent company, Rounds & Porter, Inc. of Wichita, Kansas, which owned retail lumber yards in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. These corporations operated together for a number of years, but the multiplicity of names confused even managers within the companies.

Unable to compete with more modern facilities, the Rockport mill closed in 1957 and was dismantled and auctioned off in 1960, following Rounds death. In that same year, the American Tree Farm System certified the Rockport Redwood Company's 36,481-acre timberlands as the Ralph M. Rounds Tree Farm and managed the land for long-term timber growth, with annual sales to neighboring companies. Family heir, Ralph C. Bill Rounds sold Rockport Redwood Company to Georgia-Pacific on July 30, 1968. In 1973 the Rounds Tree Farm was spun off from Georgia-Pacific into the newly created Louisiana-Pacific Corporation. As of 1991, Louisiana-Pacific continued to operate the Rounds Tree Farm for long-term timber growth.

[From Alley, Bowen & Co.'s History of Mendocino County (1880, reissued, 1967: Mendocino Historical Society), with additional information provided by Ron Arnold, Bellevue, Wash.]

From the guide to the Rockport Redwood Company Records, ca. 1907-1969, (The Bancroft Library)