The Northern Pacific Railroad reached Montana in the 1880s, and the Great Northern followed soon after. The transcontinental railway was completed in 1893, and the line continued expanding throughout the Northwest. Since a mile of track required 2,500 railroad ties, plus lumber for bridges, pilings, telegraph poles and snow fences, the logging industry in Montana grew alongside the railroads. In the late 1890s, James J. Hill, founder of Great Northern Railroad, sent Minnesota lumberman John O’Brien to build a sawmill on the north side of Flathead Lake. Great Northern completed an 11-mile spur line from Kalispell to the mill site in 1900, and a year later the town of Somers was born.
1953, brothers George and Ron Devoe, through the newly formed DeVoe Lumber Company, bought the old sawmill and the rights to its property—including the sunken logs. The brothers had grown up in Somers, and their father and other family members had worked at the old mill. The sunken logs, sometimes called “deadheads,” were valuable, and the DeVoe Lumber Company recovered more than a million board feet from Flathead Lake between 1955 and 1957. Ron’s daughter Virginia DeVoe Gentry remembers watching the divers. “[They had] big helmets that screwed down, and they’d pump air down to them. My dad always called them pearl divers. My cousin and I would sit out on the pilings and watch the pearl divers go down and bring up the logs.”
Named for George Somers, a railroad executive, the company town grew quickly and was soon producing millions of board feet annually. Men came from around the country to work, and ethnic neighborhoods called Swede Hill, Dirty Dozen and Pickleville popped up.
A fire destroyed the sawmill in June 1957. The blaze started at 5 a.m. and the building was totally destroyed by 7:30. Most of the DeVoe family left Somers soon after, Ron’s family to Arizona, and George’s to Idaho.
By 1937, the railroad company employed 375 workers and owned nearly everything there—the townsite, the company store, the water and electric utilities, and John O’Brien’s mansion on the hill above town. In addition to railroad ties, lumber was produced for flooring, molding and siding, and crates to ship apples from the region’s orchards. Everything was hauled away on the tracks. From its company records it became evident that the company paid the sawyers for more logs than were processed at the mill. These missing logs—approximately 10 percent in all—had sunk. After World War II the railroad moved its operation to a tie plant nearby and closed the sawmill. Then in Above: In this historic photo, sawyers stand on springboards while using a crosscut saw. Right: Logs cut in the region around Flathead Lake were shipped downstream in annual spring log drives and then barged to sawmills on the lakeshore.Photos courtesy of Northwest Management
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