Real Estate or Industrial Site

What Will Become of Stimson’s Land?

By Robert Struckman, 8-10-08

Scott Cooney, a Missoula developer, says he has a months-old agreement with Stimson Lumber Co. to buy the company’s defunct mill site in Bonner and wants it honored.

“We just want to buy it,” Cooney said, adding that the old offer of $10 million for the entire site is immaterial. He would pay up to $16 million, which is what Stimson officials said would take the property and all its industrial equipment and structures off the Portland-based manufacturer’s hands.

It’s hard to know exactly how serious he is: Cooney said today that if Stimson doesn’t honor its earlier agreement with him, he might seek legal action.

The bigger question remains what will happen on that expanse of land at the confluence of the Clark Fork and Blackfoot rivers.

For the past century, those broad fields have been piled high with logs, active with heavy equipment and hundreds—sometimes thousands—of mill workers and others. Or they have been covered by the massive buildings there, under whose roofs millions of board feet of plywood have been made.

But that was only one of the most recent of business endeavors there. Factories there have made mining timbers, railroad ties, ladders, dimensional lumber and other basic timber products. There have been more elaborate projects, too. Ready-made homes were built, wall-by-wall, roof trusses and everything. The walls included insulation, wiring, windows and doors.

Always the industrialist owners of the plant searched for profitable niches, the best way to employ that piece of real estate and the equipment on it.

The Stimson guys say the lack of a steady supply of cheap timber (which is a nod to the old fight between environmentalists and the timber industry) makes the site unworkable for them.

That may be, but other issues are at play, as well. Namely, the value of the land itself. And that may push it toward a new basic use.

Cooney wants to develop it for a variety of uses, including residential and light industrial. He even added the term, “educational,” in reference to his idea of a museum there. The whole real estate package would include commercial, too. (One local developer told me several years ago to look to that piece of land for the next pile of big box stores.)

Others hope to retain some kind of industrial or manufacturing work on the site.

I wonder. It’s hard to argue with capitalism. though.

There may be a time in the not-too-distant-future, when the term “Green Chain” has to be explained in the museum there, or maybe it’ll be employed as the name of an apartment building or a Bonner street.

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