The city built on the site of Camp White.


    The home design trend, particularly in the East, is to colonial style. And that's good for Cascade Wood Products at White City.
    Eighteen months ago the company, located on Avenue H, started manufacturing columns and spindles to utilize every scrap of wood turned out at its main plant, and to broaden the company's already flexible production base. When the market drops off on one remanufactured wood product, the other products compensate.
    The colonial trend is good for the Medford area, in that salaries of 320 employees working in two plants, not including office and sales personnel, comes from it.
    These employees are involved in basic industry. Cascade buys raw materials locally and in the surrounding area, while 90 percent of its sales market is east of the Mississippi. This means that all moneys brought from eastern sales and used for salaries and materials are new to the local economy. They provide for many jobs in local supply and service industries.
    The company manufactures window frames, door frames, inside jambs, moldings, adjustable jambs, box cleats as a by-product, and spindles, posts and columns, to name a few of the 90 items.
    The company is noteworthy for other reasons, too. Many of the machines it uses were invented and developed by company personnel. The company's sophisticated recovery techniques have placed it five years ahead of the rest of the industry. This is a low margin, high volume operation. Key to profit is automation.
    Among the key men in the operation are eight millwrights used for maintenance and fabrication. Noting a small woodshed filled with tools and equipment, Larry Scoville, son of the owner, said they can build machinery needed for manufacturing. The plant, for example, has 18 cut-off saws, all of which were made in the machine shop.
    The operation starts with shop grade planed lumber, which is lumber graded for actual use, such as sash, doors and general cut stock for remanufacture. However, the company has a planer so it can plane its own lumber if necessary. The company uses all clear lumber, material with pitch or knots goes into box cleats.
    Two finger joint machines joint all scrap material eight inches and over in length. Any length under that goes into chips. Machines also glue stock together for posts and columns. Edgings from the lumber are used for small types of molding.
    The company operates 10 moulders and produces approximately 320,000 lineal feet per day. It primes about 50 percent of the K.D. window frames it produces.
    The plant includes a cut shop, finger jointer department, molding, priming shop, and a crosswork department where machines miter and cut material square. A miter is a joint formed by fitting together two pieces beveled together at a corner.
    One corner of the plant is devoted to hand work. The company will take orders for as few as 20 pieces to be hand-worked. This, too, is for customer satisfaction. Profit doesn't figure heavily here.
    "We do a tremendous amount of treating," young Scoville explained. Three tanks containing a fast-drying chemical are used for wood preservation.
    The plant is laid out so eight box cars can be loaded at once.
    A variety of wood is used. Dry pine is used for millwork, ponderosa and sugar pine for colonial columns, and fir and hemlock for spindles. Western hemlock takes a stain well and can simulate hardwood, Sales Manager Dean Collins explained.
    The shop lumber comes from Northern California, Southern Oregon and Klamath Falls areas. Hemlock comes from Canada, Northern Oregon and Washington.
    The machine shop designed and fabricated the column lathe, which turns out 150 columns in an eight-hour shift. Spindles are turned approximately one every 33 seconds on a lathe, and posts are turned one every two minutes.
    Spindles are distributed over the country for a wide variety of uses, including use in furniture, as room dividers, and in decorator doors. A new item to appear on the market soon is a book shelf, which will be unfinished and ready to assemble without tools.
    Cascade warehouses a large volume of turnings and sells from inventory, mostly to jobbers and wholesalers. A warehouse in Atlanta, Ga., is used for distribution in the Southeast.
    Columns are 6 to 12 inches in diameter and 8 to 12 feet long. Posts are 4 to 6 inches square and 8 and 9 feet long. Spindles are 2, 3 and 4 inches square and 1 to 6 feet long.
    Cascade can produce approximately 150,000 board feet of these items a month. The plant is not producing at full capacity yet.
    Fifty cars of material shipped in August made the second largest month for the 17-year-old company.
    It is constantly expanding and seeking better efficiency. One move in this direction is increased emphasis upon modern management information systems implemented through the use of computers.
    Cascade Wood Products was one of the first forest products companies in the White City area to convert its burners. It "hogs" all waste material for chips, which are sent to Timber Products for its particle board.
Medford Mail Tribune, November 1, 1970, page C1 Last revised August 15, 2026