Sierra Nevada Wood & Lumber Company 1878 Vintage Men’s Hoodie

In 1878 Hobart & Marlette Lumber Mill incorporated into the Sierra Nevada Wood & Lumber Company. By November 1879 the SNW&LC had completed construction on a new mill at Crystal Bay on the northeast shore of Lake Tahoe. Crystal Bay was actually named, not for its clear waters, but for George Crystal, who filed the first timber claims in the area in the early 1860s. The SNW&LC had bought and leased over ten thousand acres of timberland along the eastern slopes of Lake Tahoe. The Ponderosa and Jeffrey pines weren’t as large as those further west in the Sierra Nevada, but these tight grained pines made strong timbers to hold up the earth in the ever deepening stopes and shafts under Virginia City. To get the felled logs to the mill, oxen skidded the logs through the rough terrain to dry chutes, which were made of two parallel saplings, where horses would speed them to either the mill, the lake, or later, railroad landings. Once the lumber was sawn, it was loaded on to small railcars, and these cars were pulled up the mountain by the famous Incline Railroad. The incline was built in 1880, with the 8,000 feet of cable weighing 14,000 pounds, taking almost a week to haul and ship from Truckee. The lift was 1,400 feet vertically and the rail line 4,000 feet long, and the railway ended up being the groundwork for what would become Incline Village.