Allan Stevens reached the same age as many of the trees he used to cut.
With one of the tallest reputations among the Prince George forestry pioneers, Stevens died last Thursday at Peace Arch Hospital in White Rock.
Today would have been his 97th birthday.
Almost his entire life was lived in the Central Interior where he epitomized the hewers and millers this city's personality was built on.
Born in 1915 in Lansford, North Dakota, his family moved to this area before he was two. His father took up tie hauling and contract logging for mills on Prince George's eastern line, and it wasn't long before Stevens took up the axe himself.
As a teenager, one of his first jobs was woodcutting in the Otway area, but his first career was farming. He worked at the Centralia Dairy near Moore's Meadow and in 1939 took the opportunity to buy it.
That same year he married the girl he fell for at a Nukko Lake dance, Olga Rahn, daughter of a successful farming family from the Chief Lake area north of the town.
They lived at the north end of Lyon Street near his family's house.
The two kept working the dairy farm until 1946 when they had a chance to expand into Alberta farming, buying a spread near Grande Prairie, but a major hail storm ruined his crops and his bottom line so he had to abandon that dream.
Their next venture was ownership of Kokanee Lodge near Nelson, but a major flood hit the Fraser Valley blocking tourists from travelling to their area.
Then Olga's brother Bill came down for a visit, and to make a proposal.
"Bill knew of a bankrupt sawmill at Salmon Valley," said Stevens's son Lamont. "He suggested they partner up and buy it. Dad always considered that to be a very, very good piece of luck thanks to Bill. They were excellent partners that complemented each other. They themselves very nearly failed but for another bit of luck: short of funds and unable to borrow at one point in their first year, dad received crop relief money for the failure of his crops in Grande Prairie two years prior. With that they were off and running."
Stevens and Rahn Lumber Co. started out like most typical sawmills in the area, slicing up somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 board-feet per day. They succeeded and expanded, establishing their second mill in the Talus Road area near Summit Lake, and then, when the timber near the Summit Lake mill ran short, established a third mill at Kerry Lake. This one would become their flagship operation, putting out about 50,000 board feet per day.
He and other partners were also involved in hotel investments at McLeod Lake and Hudson's Hope.
In 1963 Stevens and Rahn reached the peak of their lumber ambitions. They sold the Kerry Lake operation to The Pas Lumber Company, now Winton Global, a division of Sinclar Group.
"Kerry Lake was the biggest of those small-scale lumber mills and I would say the last," said Lamont.
"All the mills after that were
significantly bigger."
Lamont said his father and uncle were also part of another pivotal moment in local forestry history, when they purchased a shuttered mill at the southern end of Davie Lake with no intention of firing it up "because what was important to them was the timber quota that came with the mill. That was the first consolidation of mills that I think happened in the P.G. lumber industry, but it was exactly what the entire industry would eventually become. They purchased the quota partnership with Summit Lake Sawmills and split the quota between the two companies."
It took a few years after the sale of the company, but Stevens eventually retired for good in 1970. He and Olga enjoyed the time with their four children and the grandchildren that would come. They moved to a farm on Ferguson Lake Road still occupied by family. They took to wintering in Yuma, Arizona but came back to the farm up until 2010 when the couple moved to White Rock.
Olga remains there, living with her two daughters.
Lamont said that although she was born in 1919 she "is vibrant, in great physical health, she's just incredible."
Vibrancy is a word that applies well to his father as well, said Lamont. He was active in the area's lumberman's association, and was such an avid fisher that, "I think he was personally responsible for the catch limits imposed on the area lakes." He was also active on the baseball diamond. Lamont remembered that, "in the 1980s there was a special ceremony held in Prince George to honour the founders of the region's baseball organizations. Dad was the catcher that night for those ceremonies."
