Hampton Lumber

Hampton Lumber

Darrington, Washington - Hampton Lumber Mills seen from Washington State Route 530 - 01.jpg
The Hampton Lumber sawmill in Darrington, Washington, seen from State Route 530
Type	Private
ISIN	🆔
Industry	Forest products
Founded 📆	1942 (1942) in Willamina, Oregon, U.S.
Founder 👔	Lester M. "Bud" Hampton
Headquarters 🏙️	, Portland, Oregon , U.S.
Area served 🗺️
Key people	Steve Zika (interim CEO)
Products 📟	Dimensional lumber, studs, engineered wood
Members
Number of employees	c. 1,700 (2025)
🌐 Website	hamptonlumber.com
📇 Address
📞 telephone

Hampton Lumber (legally Hampton Resources, Inc.) is an American forest products company headquartered in Portland, Oregon. Founded in 1942, when Lester M. "Bud" Hampton purchased a sawmill and surrounding timberland in Willamina, Oregon, the company has remained privately held and family-owned for four generations. As of 2026, Hampton operates nine sawmills in Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, employs approximately 1,700 people, and is among the ten largest softwood lumber producers in the United States.

The company expanded from its original Willamina mill under second-generation leader John C. Hampton, entering Washington in 1999 and purchasing the Darrington sawmill in 2002. It entered British Columbia in the late 2000s; in 2012, a dust explosion at its Babine Forest Products sawmill near Burns Lake killed two workers. Recent developments include the purchase of 145,000 acres of Washington timberland from Weyerhaeuser in 2021, the acquisitions of Idaho Timber in 2022 and RedBuilt in 2024, the closure of its Banks sawmill in 2024, and the 2025 announcement of its first East Coast sawmill, in Allendale County, South Carolina.

Hampton is also known for a 300-foot (91 m) "smiley face" of trees it planted in 2011 on a hillside near Willamina, visible from Oregon Route 18 each autumn when the larch trees forming the design turn yellow.

History

Founding and early years

Lester M. "Bud" Hampton began operating a retail lumberyard in Tacoma, Washington, in 1935. During a wartime lumber shortage in 1942, he purchased a sawmill and approximately 11,000 acres of timberland near Willamina, Oregon, founding the Willamina Lumber Company to supply his Tacoma yard. His son John C. Hampton formed Hampton Lumber Sales, a wholesale division trading lumber from outside mills, in 1950.

Hampton Affiliates era

John Hampton, who succeeded his father as chief executive, formed Hampton Tree Farms in 1970 and began intensive management of the company's western Oregon forestland. By the end of the 1970s the company had adopted the umbrella name Hampton Affiliates for its subsidiaries, which included Hampton Lumber Sales, Hampton Industrial Forest Products, Hampton Hardwoods, Hampton Power Products, and All-Coast Forest Products. A $9 million expansion at Willamina in 1979 added a small-log mill, a veneer mill, and a steam boiler.

The company made several acquisitions during the 1980s, including Champion Plywood in 1983 and the Fort Hill Lumber Company in 1988. When workers at Willamina Lumber struck during a 1983 contract dispute, the company hired non-union replacement workers; the International Woodworkers of America retained bargaining rights in a 1984 election and subsequently signed a concessionary contract that made the mill an open shop.

Logging restrictions adopted to protect the northern spotted owl in the late 1980s and early 1990s sharply reduced federal timber supplies in the Pacific Northwest. After the owl was listed as a threatened species in 1990, a federal court injunction in 1991 halted most timber sales in its habitat, and the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan cut harvests on the region's national forests by roughly 80 percent, contributing to mill closures across Oregon and Washington in a period that became known as the "timber wars". Hampton temporarily closed two Willamina-area mills in 1989, cutting roughly 150 jobs, and reduced production at Fort Hill in 1990. John Hampton became a prominent industry voice during the conflicts, chairing the Northwest Forest Resource Council, a timber group that was among the plaintiffs challenging the Northwest Forest Plan in court. In 1991, the company agreed to sell about 29 acres of old-growth forest adjacent to Forest Park in Portland to a conservation nonprofit for $600,000. Ron Parker became the company's third chief executive in 1995.

Washington expansion

In 1999, Hampton purchased three sawmills and a reloading facility from Pacific Lumber & Shipping Company and acquired Cowlitz Studs, entering stud lumber production in southwest Washington with mills in Morton and Randle; an associated purchase added 94,000 acres of timberland. At the time, the company employed about 750 people and produced roughly 575 million board feet of lumber annually.

Hampton agreed in late 2001 to purchase the idle sawmill in Darrington, Washington, from Summit Timber, completing the acquisition in February 2002. The mill reopened in 2003 after $15 million in renovations and became the town's largest employer. Steve Zika became the company's fourth chief executive in 2003.

John Hampton died of lung cancer in March 2006 at age 80. At the time, the company had approximately 1,500 employees, five sawmills in Oregon and Washington, 167,000 acres of timberland, and annual capacity of about 1.4 billion board feet.

British Columbia and the recession era

Hampton entered British Columbia in the late 2000s, acquiring majority interests in the Babine Forest Products and Decker Lake Forest Products sawmills near Burns Lake, operated jointly with the Burns Lake Native Development Corporation. During the Great Recession, the company purchased a closed Weyerhaeuser sawmill in Warrenton, Oregon, in December 2009, reopening it in 2011 after a 20-month shutdown and about $18 million in deferred maintenance and modernization. The Darrington mill laid off 67 workers in 2011, citing declining demand.

On January 20, 2012, a wood dust explosion and fire destroyed the Babine sawmill east of Burns Lake, killing workers Robert Luggi Jr. and Carl Charlie and injuring 20 others. Investigators with WorkSafeBC determined that accumulated combustible wood dust from dry, beetle-killed timber fueled the blast. British Columbia's Criminal Justice Branch declined to approve charges, and in 2014 WorkSafeBC imposed an administrative penalty and claims levy totaling about $1 million against Babine Forest Products. The mill was rebuilt and reopened in 2014.

The 2014 Oso landslide severed Washington State Route 530 west of Darrington, the mill's primary shipping route, for several months; the company kept the mill operating despite substantially higher trucking costs from the long detour.

Recent history

Hampton acquired a sawmill in Banks, Oregon, in 2016, and in 2019 agreed to purchase the Fort St. James, British Columbia, sawmill and associated timber tenure from Conifex Timber in a transaction valued at approximately $39 million. A newly built Fort St. James mill began operating in late 2022.

In 2021, Hampton purchased 145,000 acres of timberland in Washington's North Cascades from Weyerhaeuser for $266 million to supply the Darrington sawmill. The land, spread across Whatcom, Skagit, Snohomish, King, Chelan, and Kittitas counties, had been part of Weyerhaeuser's 2013 acquisition of Longview Timber.

The company acquired Idaho Timber, a Boise-based lumber remanufacturer and distributor, in 2022, and RedBuilt, a Boise-based engineered wood products manufacturer, in 2024. Randy Schillinger succeeded Zika as chief executive in June 2023.

In January 2024, Hampton announced the closure of its Banks sawmill, which employed 58 people; a mill had operated in Banks since 1961. The company attributed the decision to declining log availability in northwest Oregon and a proposed habitat conservation plan that would reduce harvests on state forests. Environmental groups disputed that explanation, with a Wild Salmon Center policy manager calling the conservation plan "a convenient scapegoat" and pointing to the company's concurrent $150 million investment in its Willamina mill; Hampton said the two decisions were unrelated.

In June 2025, Hampton announced plans for its first sawmill outside the Pacific Northwest: a $225 million southern yellow pine mill in Fairfax, Allendale County, South Carolina, expected to begin operating in 2027 with at least 125 employees. Ground was broken at the Fairfax site in November 2025.

Schillinger departed the company in late 2025; board vice chairman Steve Zika, who had led Hampton for two decades before 2023, returned as interim chief executive in December 2025, which the company confirmed publicly in March 2026.

Operations

Hampton operates nine sawmills: Willamina, Tillamook, and Warrenton in Oregon; Darrington, Morton, and Randle in Washington; and Babine, Decker Lake, and Fort St. James in British Columbia. The Willamina facility, on the site of the original 1942 mill, remains the company's largest. According to the company, it markets more than 2 billion board feet of its own production annually, along with lumber purchased from other mills through its wholesale division, Hampton Lumber Sales; its export business operates as TRAPA Forest Products. Subsidiaries Idaho Timber and RedBuilt produce remanufactured lumber and engineered wood products, respectively.

Through Hampton Family Forests, the company owns and manages timberland in Oregon and Washington certified by the Sustainable Forestry Initiative. The Darrington sawmill operates a 7-megawatt biomass cogeneration plant, installed in 2006, that generates electricity from mill wood waste.

Forisk Consulting ranked Hampton among the ten largest softwood lumber producers in the United States in 2024.

Willamina smiley face

In 2011, company co-owner David Hampton and timberland manager Dennis Creel planted a roughly 300-foot (91 m) "smiley face" design on a Hampton hillside in Polk County, Oregon, south of Oregon Route 18 between Willamina and Grand Ronde. The face is formed by larch trees, whose needles turn yellow each autumn, set against evergreen Douglas fir forming the eyes and mouth. The company has said the design will remain visible each fall for several decades until the stand is harvested.

Community involvement

As the largest employer in Darrington, Hampton is closely tied to the town's logging community. After the 2014 Oso landslide, a deadly mudslide about 12 miles (19 km) to the west, that community joined the search-and-recovery effort, with loggers and heavy-equipment operators working the debris field despite official warnings to stay clear; the company had a former employee among the dead and a current worker whose home was destroyed.

Hampton has funded projects in several of its mill towns. In March 2024, it donated $1 million to the Sheridan School District in Oregon toward the Barbara Roberts Career and Technical Education Center, a regional vocational facility, and in May 2024 it pledged $250,000 toward the expansion of Columbia Memorial Hospital in Astoria, Oregon. Since 2018, the company has sponsored Girls Build, a Portland nonprofit that runs construction-skills summer camps for girls, hosting camps near several of its mills, and it has supported school music programs, including a $50,000 donation to the Mossyrock School District in Washington.

External links

• Official website

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