Ferguson Timber Mills

We have found records of two communities known collectively as the Ferguson Timber Mills. The first was at Lowden and the other at Yarloop.

Lowden

John Maxwell Ferguson of J. M. Ferguson Ltd gained timber rights to the area in May 1907 and presumably soon afterwards constructed the mill and a railway line to the Government siding. In August 1908 the company went into voluntary liquidation and was operated as a subsidiary of Millars. The new capital this realised allowed the logging railway lines to be extended to the Number 5 landing during 1909. In March 1910 J. M. Ferguson Ltd was formally wound up and the mill was operated as Swan Saw Mills Ltd. There was a total of about twenty four kilometres of railway line laid south of the mill. The mill closed in 1914 although sleeper hewers continued to work there throughout the concession area and the locomotive ran out over the existing lines to collect this timber as required. The mill was dismantled, and most of the rail and employees moved to the companies new mill at Claymore in 1920. The company’s siding and points on the Government line at Lowden were removed in May 1922.

At an unidentified date there were workers huts and a small hall on the slopes around the mill and a brick managers house on a small hill separate from the rest of the camp. In addition about halfway between the mill settlement and the Government railway siding was the Number 1 log landing where a workers boarding house was sited. There was another boarding house at the Number 5 landing.

According to one source, the timber mill was about 1.6Km south of the Lowden Government railway siding at the foot of a steep range bordering the Preston River Valley².

Yarloop

The Yarloop mill is believed to have been eight kilometres south east of Yarloop on the J. M. Ferguson company line from just south of Cookernup³.

This mill was also developed by the John Ferguson. A wooden railed horse tramway ten kilometres long was completed by November 1898 to the South West Railway at Cookernup, where his company J. M. Ferguson Ltd paid the railway to put in a private siding. The tramway and presumably the mill were closed sometime shortly after May 1907. The total line in this system was about fifteen kilometres⁴.

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Sources

1. Shire of Harvey, n.d. Yarloop History. Image retrieved from https://harveyregion.com.au/things-to-do/history-heritage/our-history/yarloop-history/ on 16 Oct 2024. ↩︎
2. AUSTIN, Jeff & GUNZBURG, Adrian – Rails through the Bush : Timber and Firewood Tramway and Railway Contractors of Western Australia. – Rail Heritage W.A. Bassendean. 2008. p 91. ↩︎
3. AUSTIN, Jeff & GUNZBURG, Adrian – Rails through the Bush : Timber and Firewood Tramway and Railway Contractors of Western Australia. – Rail Heritage W.A. Bassendean. 2008. p 264. ↩︎
4. AUSTIN, Jeff & GUNZBURG, Adrian – Rails through the Bush : Timber and Firewood Tramway and Railway Contractors of Western Australia. – Rail Heritage W.A. Bassendean. 2008. p 91. ↩︎