Born in Newport, Vermont, raised in Irasburg, and having lived much of her adult life in Albany, Colleen Goodridge considers herself “a product of the Kingdom.” For the uninitiated, that’s the Northeast Kingdom, that corner of Vermont that juts into northern New Hampshire and butts up against Canada. As such, Colleen has an enduring appreciation for both the region’s beauty and the hard work of making a living here. With her sons, she owns and runs Goodridge Lumber, established in 1974. She’s long been a director of the Vermont Forest Products Association and sits on the advisory committee for the North Country Career Center, where she strives to help build a healthy future for Vermont’s working lands.
I was brought up on a dairy farm in Irasburg, which my parents Wayne and Elizabeth Doncaster purchased in the early 1960s. I’m the oldest of five children. Growing up, we were all actively involved in the farm operations, whether it was tending to our herd of registered Jerseys, taking them to the fairs, haying, sugaring, firewood. Whatever work needed to be done, that’s what you did. The farm consisted of 450 acres, comprising the hay land, pasture for the animals, a sugarbush, and in the back of property was a very good hardwood stand that had its own management plan.
We skied, we snowshoed. We had two miles of trout stream running through the property, so if you did your evening chores, you could grab your fishing pole and head down after supper and do a little fishing. It wasn’t all work, but we did work together and took time together as a family. We were happy. The farm is now in its 3rd generation of our family, and we still go back and gather the family. It’s still there if I want to fish in the brook or go over to the barn and feed hay or something else. Luckily the farm is still continuing, although any business working the land is tweaking things and diversifying. I think we’re all trying to find our way.
After I left the farm, I taught school for a few years. Then I got married, and we thought of building a log home. That’s where the sawmill story starts. We loved the forest, the woods, lumber – and a log home seemed to fit our needs very well. We could locally source the material. We worked with a farmer down the road on a woodlot he was working on behind our Albany property. We worked with him in trade for 9- and 10-inch diameter logs. When spring came, we had a pile of logs, and this lightbulb went off – wouldn’t it be fun to saw our own? That was the first dangerous question.
We went exploring and found a “sawmill” out in a farmer’s field in Glover. It was on a hay wagon covered in a tarp. And we bought this sawmill for $500 and thought we had quite a purchase. We were bringing it home from Glover to Albany over the back roads during mud season. We got two flat tires on the way, and that should have been a sign of “don’t do this.” But, being young, we just got things fixed up, got the sawmill into the farmer’s yard. This sawmill was PTO-driven, so we used the farmer’s tractor to start things up and discovered that the sawmill had missing parts. We had no money, but we did have a pile of logs. We sold the logs, and with that money, we got the parts to fix the mill and finally got that blade so it turned and actually could saw something.
In 1974, a mill in Hardwick was sawing hardwood railroad ties and could not keep up with the demand. They agreed to pay us per thousand board feet to saw the logs into ties. It sounded like a good idea, so we got the sawmill running. That went along okay until the farmer needed his tractor for haying. Then we had a shanty and a mill, but no power. Our first major investment, other than this $500 sawmill, was a Ford 5,000 tractor that we bought for $5,000. Then we had our own power for milling. We stopped sawing the railroad ties, moved the mill a couple of times, upgraded equipment, and began sawing pine and cedar.
We started the business officially in 1974. We built the house in 1978. The house is right in the middle of things at the mill and is mostly used for office space now. A few years ago, we bought a property in Irasburg with a warehouse where we store planed material. The property had an old farmhouse, which we renovated. It’s beautifully done. And at 60 years old, I said, “I’m leaving home.” I moved to Irasburg, so I do drive to work now – about six miles.
As things were evolving with the mill, three sons were born, and now they own the business with me. Doug has a 2-year civil engineering degree from Vermont Tech. He is responsible for the sawing operations. Mark apprenticed with a millwright out of high school, and boy, learning those skills and bringing them back to the sawmill has been very important. He is in charge of the planing operations and a lot of the repair, maintenance, and equipment purchases. Brian is the youngest. He has his CDL for trucking, and he is in charge of buying the logs, unloading the logs, scaling them and putting them in the appropriate pile, the yard, deliveries. I was actively involved physically out in the mill until a few years ago, when we were able to hire more help and the office – email, calls, customers coming in – became so busy that that’s where I mainly focus now. However, if someone is out, you might hear, “Ma, can you come out and tail the saw for a while?” I know I’m still useful.
In 1985, we switched strictly to white cedar, which is locally harvested, with logs procured from a 75-mile radius. The Northeast Kingdom is a good spot for cedar to grow. That has done well for us, having a specialty project. We knew when we were sawing softwood that logs were going to Canada, being processed and shipped back to the United States and sold for less than what we could process a log behind the mill and sell. Pine was a good seller. We did have the planer that we could do tongue-and-groove and square-edged boards and so forth. But that’s a more common species, so we were in competition with a fair amount of people. The white cedar is a very special product, and it grows right where we live, so we felt that it would be good to cultivate that one species.
We go through about a million board feet per year. It depends on what is available for harvesting in the Northeast Kingdom. It comes off land owned by the private sector, and most of those people do have a forest management plan, so there’s X-amount available for harvesting per year. That’s why we’ve gauged our business on around a million feet, because that’s what we’ve typically been able to obtain from this area. Our orders are both wholesale and retail. The wholesale will go out throughout New England. We do a lot of business with fence companies for their posts, and we do the rough green lumber for a playground company. The retail is mainly Vermont, but people from New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York will make the drive to get the cedar. The retail is rough or planed cedar lumber, cedar logs for log homes, 2x6 and 2x8 log siding, and tongue-and-groove, shiplap, and the eased edge decking.
Being able to be in business with your family, using a renewable, natural resource is a gift. I enjoy meeting the customers and seeing a finished product – and maintaining close relationships with our customers. When people come up to open their camps in the summer, it’s a ritual – they stop in, whether it’s for one board for their dock or if they’re going to put an addition on. They become part of your family.
I think that running a business in general seems to be more complicated now. For years and years, things didn’t change much. The loggers went into the woods, and the winter harvest was important to them. When mud time came, they did machinery maintenance, registered their trucks, took that time out of the woods to regroup for the summer logging season. After the summer season, they would shut down and again do repairs, maintenance. November was deer hunting season and that was the priority, Thanksgiving with family, then get ready for the winter season again. What we’ve noticed is that over time, things have changed. Sometimes they’ve had to diversify into other areas during the year to make a living. So it’s not always cut-and-dry like the seasons used to be. Sometimes they might be working construction in the summer. We’ve had a fair amount of our loggers go into the maple sugaring industry. And that’s basically just trying to make a living.
In our saw-milling, we’ve worked to become efficient and use every fiber of that log that’s brought in, to be responsible and to economically make the mill work. We account for everything from the lumber products to the sawdust, the chips. The sawdust from our mill goes to local farmers and horse people. The chips are valuable for making mulch. We save short boards for woodworkers. We have a pallet grade for pallet makers. There is no waste product. Everything has a home.
Close to 80 percent of Vermont is forested, mostly owned by private landowners. These landowners need to have a market for whatever crop they’re raising, whether it’s hay or timber products or whatever. We know sawmills have declined in number, and we’d like to see more facilities for wood products created here in Vermont, which would create markets closer to the source and probably more money into everyone’s pockets, and provide jobs for all those people who want to remain in Vermont and raise their families. We’re hoping that we can encourage more investment in these value-added facilities. It’s costly to secure the machines needed and keep up with repairs – whether it’s a loader or a sawmill or a truck.
We have seen land ownership changes over these 40 years. New landowners come in, it might be a smaller lot than what was once a 500-acre farm, and the trees may be growing, but the landowner may not even look at it as a crop. We work to tell our story about what the forest products industry does with the new owners, who might not have exposure to what we all did growing up.
We’ve been members of the Vermont Forest Products Association for 45 years, since it was formed. I’ve been a director for 25 years, and I am a vice president now. It is a very important industry to Vermont. We’re a part of that. There are facilities smaller, some larger, but the important thing is that we all need to be here if we’re going to experience the benefits that we’ve been so lucky to have – clean air, clean water, wildlife habitat, outdoor recreation, timber products. All of the things that we kind of take for granted don’t happen by accident. It’s a circle of folks in the industry, and each one plays an important part, from the landowner who’s growing the trees to the forester who helps make management plans to getting that logger in to follow the plan, the trucker getting the wood from the landing to the mill, and the mill producing that product.
I am also on the advisory committee of the North Country Career Center. One challenge of operating a business in 2023 is the future work force. Most of the mill people and loggers are 55 years of age or older, and we don’t know who that next generation of workers is going to be. Vermont is what Vermont is not by accident, but by the dedication of families for generations of working the land. I think we’ve done a poor job in career exploration for these young people, to know that there are jobs in the forest products industry.
We’re trying to plan for the future now. Things seem to get more complicated than less complicated. As a mill business and as a forest industry, we’re hoping to maintain and strengthen our wood products industry, and hopefully grow it, with the amount of wood that is growing. You know, the garden needs to be tended.
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