LITMIR.BIZ

      This roadway, popularly known as the Tollhouse grade, was for years the burden beast killer as the highway for mountain travel and freighting. Opened to replace the ox trail and facilitate lumber shipping from Pine Ridge mills, it gave rise at the base of the grade to the settlement of Tollhouse, where Abe C. Yancey kept a roadhouse in 1868, and Henry Glass a blacksmith shop. The grade is the steepest on any public highway in the state save one, traversing hills in places on a long and steady grade of thirty-three percent. It has been the scene of several auto hill-climbing contests, the first in April, 1909, when A. J. Hudson established the record in a Dorris in twenty-four minutes and forty-eight seconds to Armstrong's seven and one-half miles above the Pine Ridge divide.

      Up this murderous grade the heaviest freight wagons for years hauled laboriously to supply the mountain saw mills, as well as tugging the heavy machinery for their operation. Donkey engines, car-wheels and track rails and a small locomotive were freighted up the mountains for the plant construction notably of the Fresno Flume and Lumber Company for its lumbering enterprise in the region about the dammed artificial Shaver Lake, and later as far back in the timber forests as Dinkey Creek. So fearful is the grade that passengers by stage were cajoled, threatened or commanded to walk it to relieve the jaded animals in the ascent.

      Early historic paragraphers from Faymonville down have credited Alexander Ball with erecting the first sawmill in 1854 on Pine Ridge. The first man was James Hulse. He located below Corlew's Meadows, and according to the story staked the mill as a wager in a poker game at a ball and lost. Then it came into the possession of Ball, who lost it by fire, hastening on his bankruptcy in 1857, one of the very earliest if not the first in the county. The original toll grade was cut by two trappers and hunters, the Woods brothers, under a charter of 1866, starting from the upper end at a place which later became known as the Widow Waite's. Their grade was about 150 feet higher than the later improved one, that first trail being yet discernible in places.

      J. W. Humphreys and Moses Mock established in 1866 a mill which became in 1870 the property of M. J. Donahoo, who also bought from Glass and others the toll road to the mills that had passed into their hands. Donahoo improved the grade, and in 1878 sold it to the county for $5,000, whereupon it became a free road, though still continuing a beast killer. Donahoo erected a planing mill in 1876 at Tollhouse, which became a busy mountain settlement, a halting station on the stage line, and before the flume a shipping point for the Pine Ridge lumber cut, already a county resource. The sites of these many early mills may be located today on the edges of the deep ravines that have been filled with the heaped up great accumulations of rotting saw-dust.

      The timber belt that in the course of years has been pretty well denuded was an extensive one, over twenty-five miles wide and sixty long, embracing over 1,500 square miles, estimated at 8,000 feet an acre to contain over 9,600,000.000 feet of lumber, considered a low average, and placing the value at ten dollars per thousand the aggregate would be $96,000,000, considered not fifty percent, of the real value. The Pine Ridge district was in its day a perfect web of sawmills and camps, with Ockenden as the center of the mills and timbering operations. It was the most important mountain settlement, contributing to the wants of thousands engaged in the industry, which was an important one of the county, coming next to mining and agriculture. It has been said that there have been as many as eighty-four mill sites, according to the tell-tale saw dust dump piles during the years when the lumbering operations were at their height.

      Equally as extensive lumber operations were prosecuted in the Kings River region, not even sparing Big Trees, with Sanger later as the flume receiving point and the mill headquarters of the Kings River Lumber Company, and at a still later date of the eastern capitalized Hume-Bennett Lumber Company which revived activities in that quarter. It undertook a great piece of work in moving mill and plant at Millwood across a range to a more promising location on Ten Mile Creek which was dammed to form a lake by an original piece of concrete construction work, the conception of Civil Engineer J. S. Eastwood. There the mill and mountain settlement of Hume has been established on the never completed state and county fostered scenic road through General Grant National Park via the Sand Creek road from Reedley and Dunlap. The dam was completed late in November, 1908, at an approximate cost of $35,000, creating an eighty-seven-acre lake with a maximum depth of fifty feet and draining an area of twenty-five square miles. It is 677 feet long on the crest and fifty-one high at its highest point, ground for it having been broken on June 26, 1908, and 2,207 cubic yards of concrete, besides eight miles of old steel cable entering into the construction.