Valley County, IDGenWeb Project

Carbarton, MacGregor, Logging Company Towns

(looking south)

"In 1917, Boise-Payette Lumber Company moved its headquarters in Long Valley from Cascade to the North Fork’s confluence with Clear Creek. Loggers named the new location Cabarton, after the company’s manager, C.A. Barton.

"Cabarton consisted of a hundred portable buildings that housed the company’s one hundred-plus employees. The town had a post office, dining hall, community bathhouse, dispensary, company store, and school that taught grades one through eight. Single men were quartered in a bunkhouse; married couples were given one of the portables. Cabarton also had its own baseball team.

"The Boise-Payette Lumber Company spent the next sixteen years logging Clear Creek and other tributaries of the North Fork east of the river. The company built a railroad up Clear Creek and established satellite camps to Cabarton to reduce the distance the men traveled to the woods each day.

"In 1934, Boise-Payette Lumber loaded the company’s portable buildings onto flat cars and shipped them to Donnelly. The buildings were deposited about a mile south of Donnelly. The new company town was renamed MacGregor after Edgar MacGregor, the woods boss in charge of the loggers. The company spent the next six yearscutting timber on Gold Fork River. In 1940, Boise-Payette Lumber once again loaded the company town onto the railroad. This time their destination was New Meadows, where they incorporated into the town itself. The logging railroad era was over, and with it the need for company towns." - Payette River National Scenic Byway Plan

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