It was in 1851, a wagon train from Salt Lake City made up of 500 Mormons arrived at the base of the San Bernardino Mountains below what is now Crestline and established a small community they called San Bernardino.
They needed lumber. So, by hand, they cut a road up the incredibily steep Waterman Canyon, and set up the first sawmill in the San Bernardino Mountains. New sawmills quickly spread eastward across the mountain tops towards Little Bear Valley now Lake Arrowhead. The rapid growth of San Bernardino and Los Angeles, created an unlimited demand for lumber. In 1867, one of the largest mills in the mountains was built by Francis L. Talmadge in the lush green meadows of Little Bear Valley that is now the bottom of Lake Arrowhead. During the early 1880's, Talmadge and other operators such as La Praix, Caley, and the Tyler brothers were hauling a combined total of four to six million board feet of lumber out of the San Bernardino Mountains each year. It was the late 1800's, when a Michigan based corporation headed up by John E Brookings purchased all the holdings of the Highland Lumber Company that was operating in the area near Running Springs. The company immediately began turning the sawmill into the largest and most contoversial operation in the mountains. They built a railroad to haul cut logs to the mill. Locomotives and flat cars were dragged up the new "City Creek Toll Road", now Highway 330, all the way to the mill just below Running Springs. The company had lumber rights to over 6,000 acres of mountain timber. Between 1901 and 1911 the Brookings Company was delivering about 10,000,000 board feet of lumber per year. The unregulated "clear-cut" methods of logging used at the time, completely stripped the watershed from large areas of the mountain. In one of the earliest conservation movements, San Bernardino valley residents got involved. They lobbied to save what was left of the timberland, and forced replanting the areas that had been cut. The Forest Service stepped in and increased its control and established new regulations. Frustrated, the Brookings Lumber Company dismantled its operations and moved to Oregon in 1912. San Bernardino County eventually took over the Brookings railroad right-of-way, and turned it into part of the Rim-of-the-world-Drive between Running Springs and Lake Arrowhead. The Brookings Company marked the end of large scale lumbering in the San Bernardino mountains.On to The Gold Rush