MORTON – When Sharon Fisher closes the door of her Heavenly Hand-Me-Downs shop May 29 in Morton’s one-street business district, it will be for the last time.

Just one day more than a year after she opened her second-hand clothing store, it will become yet another casualty of the economic malaise.

“We’re just not doin g any business,” she said recently. “Nobody has any money. Nobody is buying.”

Her shop’s failure is a reflection not only of the financial pandemic that has swept the world, but of the more virulent virus that has consumed the housing industry, the industries that supply it and the towns like Morton, about 70 miles southeast of Olympia, that depend on the timber business to keep their hearts beating.

The auto industry’s woes have attracted more publicity as the Big Three halt production in huge plants in big cities across the Midwest, but the pain is perhaps even more acute in small towns in the Pacific Northwest and the South because the timber business more often is the central reason these small towns exist.

In Morton, home of a summertime Loggers’ Jubilee, two of the three mills have suspended their businesses. And in mill towns across the country and in Canada, the story is the same.

The lists of mill closures and production curtailments locales are pages long: Aberdeen, Green Mountain, Kettle Falls, Darrington, Packwood, Republic, Beaver, Carson and Morton in Washington; Coburg, Dallas, Baker City, Springfield, Warm Springs, Madras, Vaughn, White City in Oregon; Dodson and Evergreen in Alabama; Wright City in Oklahoma, Simsboro and Dodson in Louisiana, and Hudson Bay, Carrot River, Miramichi, Delta and Drayton Valley in Canada to name just a few.

A combination of factors has contributed to the decline of these mills over the last decades: environmental concerns, the steep reduction of public forest timber harvests, the retirement of outmoded mills, floods and insect infestations.

But the departure of the small-town timber industry has seen a light-speed acceleration since the housing boom turned to bust.

The volume of lumber produced in the West is the lowest since the 1930s, says Portland’s Western Wood Products Association spokesman Robert Bernhardt Jr.

Demand for lumber and wood products nationwide is down from 64.3 billion board feet in the overheated days of the 2005 housing boom to a projected 28.9 billion board feet this year, according to an association forecast. That’s a 55 percent drop.

And the prices that timber companies get for their products has dropped sharply.

To cope with those abrupt changes, wood products companies have been forced to cut production to match diminished demand. That means shuttering wood and paper mills throughout the country. Many of those mills may never reopen.

The cuts have gone beyond simply culling the inefficient producers, said Weyerhaeuser Co. President Dan Fulton. His company has been forced to lay off workers and close mills that were stellar producers, he said.

“This is all very painful,” said Fulton in an interview after the timber company’s annual meeting last month.

‘A WHOLE OTHER THING’

Morton Mayor Jim Gerwig said that he’s never seen an economic decline in his town so deep and so worrying. Gerwig is a former timber worker who gave up his job peeling veneer from logs at the Morton Champion mill years ago to take a lesser-paying job with the state.

“We’ve seen your typical seasonal closures and curtailments through the years, but nothing quite the same as this,” he said.

“This was already a depressed area, but I think this is going to be a whole other thing,” said the mayor.

The town’s retail sales and sales tax collections have fallen, and Morton is looking at curtailing services. It’s unlikely, said the mayor, that the town government will be able to hire seasonal workers this summer to help with park and street maintenance.

The unemployment rate in Lewis County now tops 14 percent, compared with 9.2 percent statewide and 8.5 percent nationwide, according to the state Department of Employment Security. But locals in Morton think the unemployment is far higher in the east end of the county in the timber towns like Morton near the Cascades.

Two of three Morton mills have halted or curtailed production. Champion left Morton years ago, and the town’s largest employer, Hampton Affiliates’ Cowlitz mill, shut down in early winter after heavy holiday snows collapsed a roof that sheltered the mill’s planer.

Today, the Hampton mill on Highway 7 on the north side of town stands silent, its log yards swept clean of raw material. Only a handful of administrative employees and maintenance people work there now.

Fortunately for Morton, the town’s other major mill, the TMI Forest Products mill across the road from the mothballed Hampton mill, is still producing cedar fence boards.

Hampton has moved some of the Morton workers to its Randle mill, and it still has workers report one day a month so that they can qualify for health insurance coverage, said Hampton chief executive Steve Zika.

Hampton plans to begin the $3 million repair of the planer building this summer and has scheduled the mill’s reopening for September, said Zika, but the mill is expected to produce about 50 percent of the output it did before the roof collapse. That inevitably will mean fewer jobs, said Zika.

“We regret the stress this puts on our employees and the communities where we have our plants,” said Zika. “Customer demand and lumber prices are at historically low levels, and most forecasts predict it may be several years before normal housing markets return,” he said.

PART OF THE CULTURE

Family-owned Hampton has been in the lumber business for nearly 75 years starting with a lumber yard in Tacoma in 1935, but the Portland-based company has never seen a demand drop as steep as it has in the last year, said Zika.

The supply of logs was already pinched by the near-shutdown of federal timber sales, he said. Those federal sales used to amount to some 4 billion board feet of timber a year. Now they’ve declined to less than 300 million board feet annually, he said.

Hampton was forced to close its Packwood mill a decade ago because it depended heavily on timber from federal forests, he said. The Morton mill has a more diverse supply available from private lands.

That near shutdown of timber harvesting on U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management tracts has been even more painful on the east side of the Cascades where mills have little private forest lands to draw from, Zika said.

He said legal feuds with environmental forces over endangered species have throttled that federal timber supply.

Even with the prospect for the Hampton mill reopening, some longtime Morton residents think the town’s future as a timber town is clouded.

Willametta Layman, a Morton beauty shop owner, said her customers are coming in for cuts and curls less frequently now.

“They’re spreading out their money now, but they’ve still got money from unemployment. I’m worried what happens when that runs out,” she said.

Layman, for 18 years a Morton City Council member, isn’t convinced that unemployed people will flee the town.

The timber business is part of Morton’s DNA, she said, and whole families in Morton have worked for generations in the woods and at the mills.

“It’s just part of the culture. When Morton people walk into the woods, it’s home,” she said.

“Where will they go?” she asks. “They won’t find housing less expensive anywhere else, and the cost of living is low.”

A 2,000-square-foot home in Morton can be bought for about $150,000 in the present market.

She expects that the wood products industry will always be part of Morton’s basic fabric.

Unlike the cinnabar mines that provided employment for Morton residents through the 1940s, the resource won’t be depleted, she said. (Cinnabar is the mineral from which mercury is extracted.)

“Because it’s a renewable resource, and because we’ve got a lot of trees around here and because there will always be a market for lumber, I think timber will always have a place in Morton,” she said.

But until the housing business is resurrected, Morton is seeking to diversify its economy.

Mayor Gerwig said the town is talking with manufacturers of wind turbine blades to lure them to locate a factory in Morton.

“We’ve got hard-working people, and our costs are low,” he said. “We’ve even got a pretty steady wind here, so maybe they could also erect some wind turbines here to generate power.”

The town is also exploring expansion of its vestigial airport, now too small to accommodate all but the smallest and most agile aircraft. The town is considering hiring a consultant to study whether lengthening the airport runway would bring more business to Morton.

David Meglemre, a beverage-and-tobacco company owner in downtown Morton, thinks the town missed a good chance to diversify a couple of years ago when Cardinal Glass was looking for a site for a new plant, and the company approached Morton as a possible site.

The town, he said, gave Cardinal the cold shoulder, and the company built its plant in Winlock instead.

WHAT’S NEXT?

Tax law changes and reduced demand in Morton are causing Meglemre to change his business from retail to wholesale. He plans to seek customers throughout Western Washington.

“We’ve got three bars in town, and only one is open full time,” he said. “When your population can’t even support the bars, you know you’ve got trouble.”

A fully equipped storefront on the town’s main street with living accommodations has been for lease for more than a year now, but no one has signed up, he said. The price, under $1,000 a month, is attractive, he said, but no one wants to give it a go if there’s no business, even at a low rent.

Unless the town diversifies its economy, he predicts, the population will dwindle from the 1,000 or so residents that claim it as home now.

Already, said the mayor, the town’s population is down several hundred residents from its peak in the early 1970s.

Some think the town could become a retirement community for residents lured by low costs and the area’s natural beauty.

Morton is flanked on two sides by forested mountains. It sits at the intersection of Highways 7 and 12 leading to White Pass over the Cascades and to Mount Rainier. On the road west from Morton toward Interstate 5 are two Tacoma Power lakes, Riffe and Mayfield, with considerable recreational potential.

And Morton residents, in addition to promoting the town’s yearly Loggers’ Jubilee, have revived the historic Roxy Theater on Main Street and are refurbishing the town’s historic train depot with the hope that its presence may attract tourist trains from Tacoma and Elbe near Mount Rainier.

More immediately, some of the town’s residents are dealing with the consequences of the changing demographics that are closer to their hearts.

Based on projections for the next school year, Morton’s high school won’t have enough students to field a competitive football team.

The school district is studying whether to form a consolidated team with nearby White Pass.

The problem is that the two schools are historic rivals.

What will the merged team be called? Whose colors will it adopt? The White Pass Panthers’ orange and black or the Morton Huskies’ green and white?

“I think that if it happens, it will be hard for me,” said Layman, a 54-year Morton resident.

“I bleed green.”

John Gillie: 253-597-8663

john.gillie@thenewstribune.com