McNary

McNary A Transplanted Town

Text by Abraham S. Chanin Photographs by Fred Griffin If you drive west on State Route 260 from Springerville, you find yourself among great trees and towering mountains interspersed with green meadows and quiet lakes. But farther on, past the turnoff to Greer, the winter ski slopes at Sunrise, and the pristine splendor at Hawley Lake, a much different scene evolves. It comes so abruptly that it smacks your consciousness. Suddenly, along both sides of the roadway, there are burned and sagging carcasses of buildings that intrude on the beauty of the landscape. South of the highway, a grotesquely twisted and crumbled structure that once was a lumber mill offers mute evidence of a prosperous yesteryear.

You've arrived at McNary, or what remains of this once thriving town. In its heyday, it was a bustling lumber center. As one old-timer says, "It was a pretty place. A beautiful place. It was the best place in the state."

Somehow, McNary managed to survive two economic depressions as well as epidemics of typhoid, meningitis, and influenza. Then fire damaged the mill in 1948, but that still was not enough to close the town. After a second conflagration 31 years later utterly destroyed the mill, the company (then operating as Southwest Forest Industries) pulled out because the cost of rebuilding seemed prohibitive.

Writing in the Pinetop-Lakeside News in 1985, correspondent Vennie White recalled the old community: "McNary... for five decades, from the 1920s to the 1970s, was a thriving town, a place where people from throughout the White Mountains came to shop at the general store, see a show at the movie theater, or get care at the hospital. "Those who lived, worked, or visited there remember its"I think those people from down South were really surprised when they got off the trains in the mountains.boardwalks, picket fences, gardens, and flowers. They recall simple pleasures: making candy with friends, ice skating, games of fox and geese in the winter, picnics in the woods, country dances, and high school proms that everyone attended.

"It was a company town, but there was a streak of independence running through those who lived there. They knew how to get the most out of life."

McNary's roots trace back before 1924, when William Cady, James G. McNary, and Alfred Smith, partners in a McNary, Louisiana, lumber mill, came west to find new lumbering opportunities. The forests around their southern mill had been depleted.

In Arizona's White Mountains they discovered a sprawling stand of trees on the Fort Apache Indian Reservation that had been part of an earlier lumber operation. It was called Cluff Cienega and later renamed Cooley, for Corydon E. Cooley, an Army scout.

Founded in 1918, Cooley was an operation of the Apache Lumber Company, whose principal owner was Thomas E. Pollack. Pollack hired the Filer and Stowell Company of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to design what was at the time the largest, most modern lumber plant in the Southwest. It employed 400 men and could manufacture 175,000 board feet of lumber a day. But by 1921, Pollack had overextended himself financially and the mill closed. The chief creditor, Phoenix National Bank president H. J. McClung, took control and eventually found Cady and McNary, who purchased the operationin December, 1923.

The late Ed H. Foster, Sr., recalled how he had taken charge of laying out a sewer system and septic tanks for the earlier lumbering operation. Eventually 56 homes were constructed there in addition to a small hotel, bank, and schoolhouse. "All went along well during the summer and fall," Foster wrote in his memoirs, "and along about October, 1917, we finished the grade and built the log pond."

The years had not been kind to the community that Ed Foster had created. Once the takeover of the property was completed much had to be done: houses built, roads cut, the mill modernized. And that's when a unique event occurred in the annals of Arizona towns.

Writing in later years, James McNary noted, "Cady could not visualize a lumber operation without the employment of black labor, and he decided to importabout 500 of our experienced and faithful [Louisiana] employees to Arizona." So in 1924 a remarkable 1,600-mile migration began. Two trains brought almost the entire population of McNary, Louisiana, to build McNary, Arizona, and to operate the lumber mill.

Lew Calhoon, 92, who still lives in the White Mountains, was one of the men who left his home to gamble on a new life in the wilds of Arizona.

"It was quite an adventure," he says. "I guess it took us about three days to make the trip. I was really thrilled to think about being in on moving one city to another. We were well equipped, dining cars and everything. The people had lots of baggage with them, household goods, you know, and even their chickens.

"I think those people from down South were really surprised when they got off the trains in the mountains," Calhoon adds, "but I guess they liked it even at first because of the cool weather." What was an adventure for Calhoon seems to have been an ordeal for others, however. Many of the