The woman leading the Bay Area’s last remaining redwood sawmill through wildfire, pandemic

 When Janet McCrary Webb was 5 years old, she announced there was only one career path for her: working at the family mill, Big Creek Lumber Co.

On Saturdays, her father, Frank “Lud” McCrary, would take her along to the sawmill he co-founded in 1946 with his late brother, Bud, their father and uncle. She loved riding the forklifts and eagerly agreed when the yard guys put her to work sweeping and picking up trim ends.

When her high school classes were done for the day in Santa Cruz, she would wait at a bus stop on Mission Street and catch rides back to the mill on lumber trucks passing through town. She’d spend the afternoons out on the log deck helping scale — measuring the volume of the logs as they came in on trucks.

DAVENPORT, Calif. – Aug. 25: Janet McCrary Webb, president of Big Creek Lumber Co., shares a moment with her father, Frank ÒLudÓ McCrary, co-founder of the family-run sawmill in Davenport, Calif., Wednesday, Aug. 25, 2021. Lud co-founded the company with his brother, Bud, back in 1946. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group)

“It was quite a big responsibility,” said her father, now 93. “But she was really good at it. She was just into it all the time. ”

After her father and uncle retired in 2009, Webb, 61, took over as president and chief forester and is now helping the business perched above Highway 1 in the Swanton community navigate the company’s most challenging year — a pandemic along with a wildfire that destroyed acres of their timberland, burned down her parents’ home off Swanton Road and nearly took her own. All that came a year after her Uncle Bud passed away at 93, leaving his beloved home in the redwoods empty. It was destroyed, too.

So how is Janet McCrary Webb keeping it all together? Here she explains.

Q: What is it like being a woman leading a business largely associated with big burly men?

A: I grew up around a lot of people I work with. They’re just a great, great bunch to work with. For the most part, if you pitch in and work along with them and work hard, I’ve never really felt much of any kind of discrimination at all. Early on, back in the 1970s, there were very few women working in the industry. Sometimes you’d get a little bit of the ‘I’d rather talk to him over there, I don’t know if you know what you’re talking about.’ But they got used to you and they knew you knew what you were doing.

Q: What was the toll of the fire on your family properties?

A:  Over 90% of the houses in Swanton burned. My folks’ house burned. My uncle’s house burned down — everything, barns and house and equipment. It’s been tough for my parents. They’ve lived in the same spot for many years. My dad is 93. My mom is 88. It displaced them. I’m working really hard to get their place rebuilt as quickly as we can. That’s been a big side job for me. My dad was the local historian. He had kept over 50 years of diaries. I would come home from college — that’s how I would catch up on what happened in the area — I would read his diaries. I would use them as a reference. They were in a fireproof safe — that wasn’t fireproof. When a house burns flat to the ground nothing makes it. Everything melts away.

Q: How did your house fare?

A: My place made it. My husband, Steve, stuck with it overnight and managed to save it. He was the only person who ended up staying all night in Swanton. The house we live in is the oldest house in the community, not sure when it was built, probably 1870. It made it through a bunch of fires and floods. It’s still there. I’m so thankful. It’s one piece of history that’s left in the community.

Q: What did you do the night of the fire, at the mill?

A: We just spent nights here at the mill. The fire just kept coming. It kept burning over weeks. We had to have a crew on board to just chase embers. We slept on the floor of the office here for three weeks. We bought a travel trailer and had it parked here at the mill. Even though our house made it, the water system burned, all the fencing burned. Everything around us was a mess. It’s going to take a lot of time to get things put back together.

Q: How has the fire affected your business?

A: We’re dealing with as much redwood as we can that’s been burned. That’s all we’re milling this year is burned timber. That will probably go on for another year or two. Basically, we have some of our own timberland. We’re trying to thin out the most badly damaged trees that are commercial trees, primarily our redwood and some Douglas Fir. Some will die outright. Some will die over the next three or four years. Some will survive, but they’ll be pretty damaged and won’t grow very well or grow good material. It’s almost a triage thing. Right now, we’re focusing on the very worst spots. The rest we will watch and see.

Q: So your company has had to learn to be pretty nimble?

A: We’ve been through so much change, you have to learn. As a family business, the whole company has always been pretty nimble. Decisions can be made quickly and fairly informally without having to go through “proper channels.” But from a technology standpoint, we really had to figure out how to be resources during the COVID epidemic. Our managers were meeting daily for weeks on end trying to keep up with COVID and the shifting health recommendations.

Q: How much timber land was burned in the CZU fire? How much of your acreage?

A: About 10% of our timber resources come off our own land and other comes from other private land ownerships. We probably had 5,000 to 6,000 acres of good timberland that Big Creek owns that burned — and some burned more than other portions. It had to do with the elevation and the slope. Some of it burned moderately, some of it burned very hot. But the whole fire burned 85,000 acres and a good portion was private timberland and quite a bit of park and open space.

Q: What’s the biggest challenge ahead, especially with the burned trees?

A: Immediately over the next year or two, it’s going to be damaged from boring type insects. They’ll bore in, lay eggs, set up galleries inside that wood. That is particularly the case with Douglas Fir and other timber species. Those trees are, unfortunately, a lot of them are not going to be used for lumber. You can’t have those insect holes if you’re using it for structural purposes. That’s a big problem. Everyone is grappling with that. The redwood, they’re not as subject to the insect damage. We are seeing some and you have to cut around that, but you start to lose quite a bit of value.

Q: Can consumers see the difference in burned lumber?

A: The consumer isn’t going to see a difference. That all has to get cut out of the log. Where you see the most damage is with pine or fir. Redwood is more impervious to those sorts of problems.

Q: What about the price of lumber?

A: We produce primarily redwood. It didn’t react as speculatively as the more commodity items like Douglas Fir and others that ended up in short supply. Prices were good and strong with redwood but not crazy like other materials.

Q: The McCrary’s aren’t the only multigenerational family at Big Creek? Who have you known forever?

A: One is the Fusari family.  Sam Fusari was one of Big Creek’s very first employees and worked out in the woods logging and currently one of his sons, Louis, works for us as our log scaler and his son works for us logging.  We have some other multigenerational families working here as well, such as the Castillo, Rivas and James family.  But we also have a lot of just really great and experienced people that help make this business viable.

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