Lowell Thomas "Toby" Murray III (b. 1953) served as the president and CEO of the Murray Pacific Corporation from 2001 to 2017. Murray Pacific is a family-owned timber business founded by Lowell Murray, Sr. (1885-1971). In this June 2025 interview with HistoryLink’s Elisa Law, Murray recounts the 104-year history of the Murray Pacific’s business, from its establishment as the West Fork Timber Company in 1911 to its sale to Sierra Pacific Industries in 2015. Murray reflects on the successes and unique challenges faced by each generation. He discusses his grandfather’s pioneering efforts with selective logging in the 1920s and 1930s and how his father, Lowell Murray, Jr., engaged in a protracted battle with the St. Regis Paper Company in the 1970s to reclaim the family’s tree farm. He also talks about his experiences managing the family business, including restoring the family’s tree farm after to productivity after decades of mismanagement by St. Regis, and his experiences navigating a new era of environmental regulations. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
West Fork Timber Company Begins in 1911
Toby Murray: My grandfather [Lowell Murray, Sr.] was a freshman at the University of Michigan. His home was Cincinnati, Ohio. And after a few months of school, his college advisor called him in for a meeting and suggested that maybe college wasn't where he ought to be and that he ought to go west and seek his fortune.
And so, he did. He took the train out to Baker, Oregon, which initiated probably -- I don't know -- a three- to five-year period of time where he involved himself in a lot of different aspects of anything to do with wood, from carpentering, to working in a sawmill, to working in logging.
And eventually he figured out he'd never have enough money to build a sawmill. So, he learned that you could tie up a piece of timber for considerably less money. And he took on a variety of partners over the next several years. And either because of markets or other circumstances, none of those ventures worked out.
And then he was living with a guy that he had previously partnered with near Morton, Washington. And it was Christmas day, and they had eaten an early Christmas meal. And then my grandfather decided to go out elk hunting and he got lost. And so, he did what you did in those days and still do today actually, which is if you get lost, you just find a drainage and you keep walking down until you essentially run into a road or some structure of familiarity. And he had noticed as he was walking down that he had walked through a stand of fire-killed old-growth Douglas fir. And so, when he finally figured out where he was, he retraced his footsteps, located that same patch of timber, found out who the owner was, and ended up buying it.
And it was about three-quarters of a section, about 480 acres. And it was in the West Fork of the Tilton River. And so, he started the West Fork Timber Company and the West Fork Logging Company in 1911. And so that's how the family business started.
Introducing Selective Logging
TM: In the late '20s, early '30s, after logging about a hundred million feet a year and really not making any money to speak of, he basically initiated the practice of selective logging on steep terrain. Our timberland was all in the Cascade Mountains below Mount Rainier, so it was higher elevation, steeper ground, and half of the timber was hemlock and silver fir, for which there was no market in the '20s and '30s and '40s, pretty much.
When he was clear-cutting, half the trees had no value, but he still had to put the money into falling them: cutting them and getting 'em on the ground and yarding them to a landing.
And so, he started selective logging and just cutting the Douglas fir. And he went from logging a hundred million board feet a year to probably 20 to 25 million board feet a year, but making a good return on his investment, if you will.
And in a number of the old forestry publications, none of which exist today, he was known for pioneering the field of selective logging in our industry. Of course, there was no environmental sense in those days, so he was doing it for no other reason than economics.
First Generation Logging
TM: One of the stories my dad used to tell was that during the Depression, when, of course nobody was making any money doing anything, by that time he [Lowell Murray, Sr.] had a couple of large logging camps and was employing several hundred guys in the field. And they had bunk houses and cook houses and the whole nine yards.
He assembled them all together and he said, "Boys, I'm going to town and I may not be back." And that was what he said prior to going to town and meeting with the bank, who -- I'm sure in a much more complicated way than this -- basically said to themselves, "We can bankrupt this guy and take a bunch of worthless timberland and logging equipment, or we can let him work his way out of it."
And for some reason, they went with the latter. And happily, I'm here to talk about it.
The St Regis Paper Company Fight
TM: In 1943, my grandfather decided that he had spent as much time logging as he wanted to, and he entered into a agreement with the St. Regis Paper Company to take over the logging on our tree farm. And everything was still on a selective logging basis at that time.
And West Fork Timber did the marking of the trees that would be selected. So, we had control, if you will, over what got harvested. In 1959 the hemlock and silver fir market finally started to develop, and so clear-cut logging made sense again. So, we handed St. Regis the authority to clear-cut log and basically operate the whole tree farm.
The only thing that protected us in our contract with St. Regis was that they were responsible to use best industry practices in terms of their road-building, in harvesting and falling and bucking the trees, et cetera.
And to make a long story short, they very much abused our tree farm. They overcut the hell out of it. They had lousy falling practices where they broke a lot of the timber falling it over stumps and just sloppy practices. And when my grandfather had a stroke in 1969, my dad put his logging equipment up for sale and took over the company. He hired a couple of foresters and put 'em out in the field to start documenting these poor practices that St. Regis was using because it was costing us a lot of money. It was significantly decreasing the value of the timber they were harvesting because they were not being careful to save out the trees as far as they might and maximize the value of each tree. They were building poor quality roads that would last only a few years -- just poor, cheap practices.
After about four or five years of accumulating enough information, my father (Lowell Murray, Jr. [1926-2017]) notified St. Regis that we were gonna exercise the arbitration clause in our contract, which basically said if the two parties can't come to an agreement, then they'll go to this arbitration process. So, the company spent a couple years arguing back and forth about whether this should happen or not. And finally we said, “It's gonna happen.”
And the arbitration itself happened in 1978, which was for all intents and purposes, just like a lawsuit. And we had numerous experts that put together all these claims, and probably our biggest claim was lost growth because they did a terrible job of reforesting. In other words, they were clear-cutting everything and hardly replanting anything.
And so, we were asking for damages of a $100 million, which in 1978 was a lot bigger number than it is today. [Editor's note: Murray later clarified that the amount was closer to $20 million.] The arbitration process itself went on for about a month and a half, and I sat in there in the courtroom every day with my father watching the proceedings.
We had a really good case. But the good news and the bad news is that we had a really good case. The bad news being that we had a good case because of all this devastation they had caused on our tree farm. The good news being that we had a good case, so we were gonna win.
The result was we got a check for six-something million bucks, kicked St. Regis off our property, and took over the active management of it again in 1979, which was a huge deal for us.
Columbus Day Storm Leads to Japanese Export Market
TM: My dad used to talk about how he cried about every high-grade hemlock and silver fir sent to the pulp mill that were totally sound and had high quality lumber in it. But there was no demand for that kind of lumber. So they went to the pulp mill for -- I don't know – 50 dollars for a thousand, as opposed to -- if there had been a market for the lumber -- probably three or four times that much money.
In the early '60s [October 12, 1962], there was a big storm called the Columbus Day Storm. A huge wind storm that, not surprisingly, was on Columbus Day. Thus, the name. And it blew down billions of board feet in the Pacific Northwest, including huge volumes on the U.S. Forest Service timberlands.
[They were] trying to figure out how to salvage this timber and not flood the market. And between the Forest Service and the private industry, they determined that Japan could be a natural market for a lot of this wood that they either had to log, or it was just gonna rot and waste away on the ground. Which, again, is ironic because a lot of that's happening on the federal ground today. But that's another story.
And to take advantage, or to get some value out of this wood before it decayed, this market started up and it initiated a very large log export market from the '60s until through probably, oh, I don't know, maybe around 2000.
A consequence of the development of the export market was: maybe 10 years later, a lot of the saw milling industry started protesting these log exports because it was taking logs out of our domestic market and shipping them out, and, if you will, upping the competition for what logs remained in the domestic market. So, they would complain that it pushed their costs up higher, which it would've. And of course, we who were doing that, or we who owned timber, were saying what's wrong with that? That's competition. That was a big political fight all through the '70s and '80s. And I was very active in that.
We had a group called the Washington Citizens for World Trade that tried to fight off the political efforts to ban log exports. And those were interesting times.
The "Doing the Right Thing" Philosophy
TM: My grandfather has, after a few fits and starts, a very successful entrepreneur's claim to fame. Probably it was the selective logging in his logging methods, if you will. In old publications, he was always talking about logging methods, which was a term I've never heard anybody else ever use.
My father was very creative and was the only Yale-educated master’s in engineering logger I ever heard of. But when my grandfather died and my father took over the company, after he got the St. Regis, he purchased this company called Pan Pacific, which was the log export company. And then he looked for other opportunities to expand the company. His sole focus was no longer just the tree farm.
St. Regis's poor practices versus what we thought was the right way to do things really affected me, and so I spent my career trying to restore the tree farm back to productivity. And this is where it was instilled in me what I call the "doing the right thing" kind of philosophy.
The day after you finish logging, you want to get back out there and get trees in the ground, get the next crop started because the future revenue's gonna come from those trees and they're gonna take 50 years to grow. So, you gotta get 'em in the ground as soon as possible, and it would be irresponsible not to do that. I started my career of trying to bring the tree farm back to productivity.
Most of my focus was always the tree farm, plus I ran the log export business for 20 years, plus or minus. I had the Forest Practices Act, I had the Endangered Species Act, I had the Forest Practices Board, so I was very much more into the whole regulatory aspect. Those were things that largely didn't exist, certainly in my grandfather's time, and a lot of my father's time.
The Northern Spotted Owl Habitat Conservation Plan
TM: Our company did the first Habitat Conservation Plan [HCP] for the northern spotted owl in the early '90s, and my father -- every time I'd take him up to the woods after the HCP had been in effect for 10 years or so -- we'd drive by an area and there'd be these significant buffer strips we were leaving to protect water quality and fish habitat among other things.
And he'd always look at me and he'd say, "Now when are we gonna go log that?" And I'd look at him and I'd go, "Never dad, that's part of the deal." And maybe the tenth or fifteenth time he asked me, maybe he was just doing it for entertainment value. I don't know.
First of all, when we were notified that we had a couple of spotted owls on the tree farm, and that one in particular was within an area where we had already fell and bucked a bunch of timber but hadn't logged it yet, we were basically told: "You can't log those trees, you have this owl and you basically need to negotiate a Habitat Conservation Plan, or we can put your butt in jail."
So there's this little family-owned timber company being one of the test cases, if you will. And it was pretty intimidating. There's this massive federal bureaucracy and our tiny little company, but we sallied forth and we put together a team of the best experts we could find.
We hired a wonderful wildlife biologist named Marty Vaughn. And we had great attorneys, Dennis Harlow and Dan Zender, and my tree farm manager at that point, a guy named Dick Best. We spent probably a year and a half putting together and negotiating with the various U.S. Fish and Wildlife folks this Habitat Conservation Plan, and there was no template for it.
Our tree farm was basically 24 miles long and six to eight miles wide. On the east and west end, when our ownership stopped, it was the Forest Service (federally owned land), and there were owls and owl nests on either side of our tree farm.
One of the key contributors to the long-term existence of spotted owls is that the young are able to disperse from their nests and travel safely to other areas of suitable habitat without being preyed upon by other larger birds.
So, our biologists came up with this idea of developing dispersal habitat, so that the young owls could disperse and fly underneath and be protected by this crown closed set [stand] of trees that a higher-flying prey couldn't see through it and pick 'em off.
So what we committed to do was, over a 50-year period of time, grow that kind of habitat dispersed over the width and breadth of our tree farm so that the juvenile owls could safely disperse from either the east to the west or the west to the east to where there's a lot more suitable habitat on the forest service land.
And to the credit of our biologist, Marty Vaughn, who else ever would've come up with something like that? I have no idea. And that was the basis. It took us about a year-and-a-half, and I think it cost us about a million-and-a-half bucks to make that plan. And then, I kid you not, it seemed within days of having successfully completed this plan, a marbled murrelet flew over our tree farm and the feds said: "Do you wanna do an HCP [habitat conservation plan] for marbled murrelet?" And I said, "Hell no! We just spent a million-and-a-half in a year-and-a-half doing a single species HCP. I'm not doing that again." But what we will do is we'll do an All-Species HCP, the concept of which it never occurred to anybody because I didn't want to have to deal with these guys again.
"A Deal is a Deal"
TM: The bureaucrats were not very excited about this all-species thing, and that's when we started talking about, look, we need some certainty in this thing. We can't keep giving away more and more of our tree farm without knowing we're gonna be able to operate on the rest of it. And that's when between us and Bruce Babbitt (b. 1938), the Secretary of Interior, came up with the "Deal is a Deal" concept which was: "Okay, if we can come to an agreement, our deal is we're not gonna come back to you guys and ask you to do more." And this didn't happen in a few days. This took a while to put together, but we spent another year-and-a-half and another million-and-a-half bucks.
And that this was right during the time when President Clinton (b. 1946) announced the U.S. Forest Plan, which basically took the federal government out of the timber business. That was a big deal and a lot of the small timber towns in Washington and Oregon and Northern California have all been devastated by that 'cause that was all they had. But that's another story. At any rate, my guess is that the feds, in announcing this plan, was certainly controversial to all the timber towns and the timber industry, but not so controversial to the rest of the public, who not surprisingly, didn't really know very much about this issue.
I think they felt they were under a little bit more pressure to show that the Habitat Conservation Planning process could work. And so, plus we were small. So even if it didn't work that well, what did they lose? You're talking 55,000 acres out of a zillion acres of timberland and so at any rate, Norm Dicks (b. 1940), who was our congressman, was very influential. And we went back to D.C. and got to meet with Vice President Gore (b. 1948), who used us an example of how the Habitat Conservation Planning thing can work. And it was all very exciting at the time, and it was heady stuff, almost heady enough to, but not quite, to allow you to realize that you were basically giving up 15 to 17 percent of your land base for environmental purposes, species, et cetera.
But they were very exciting times and we had this group of people we worked very closely with. And we all became very close because it was the David and Goliath kind of like thing. The federal government is not to be trifled with nor is it a worthy adversary, particularly for a small, little family-owned timber company in Washington state.
Sierra Pacific Buys the Tree Farm
TM: It was exciting times and it was a major financial commitment on our part. And as I said, we never really knew if it was a very good deal for us or not until Sierra Pacific walked in the door and offered us a very significant number for our tree farm.
See, in the intervening 20-plus years, general forest practices regulations have continued to increase. But our tree farms regulations were set, our basic regulatory bar was set in an amended all species HCP that they couldn't ask us to do anymore. Over the ensuing 25 years, the general industry regulations approached or started to exceed some of ours, but ours were frozen in place.
Back to that thing "a deal is a deal" that I talked about with Bruce Babbitt, was that they could continue to operate with certainty, knowing that their future operations were not gonna be increasingly hampered or restricted by additional regulations.
"Nobody Loves the Forest More Than We Do"
TM: The environmentalists, like they're all the same, which of course they're not, are the only ones that could love the forest. "The industry doesn't love the forest. They just like to hack 'em all down." I would argue that nobody loves the forest more than we do. We spend our life in it. We're just trying to be responsible operators. If we can't make money doing it, then we're not gonna be able to do it anymore. And by the same token, we have to do it well enough so that we'll always be assured that there'll be continuing availability of timber for a market that they haven't really found much of a replacement for. They can do a few things here and there with certain products, but from an overall volume standpoint, they haven't come up with anything that can really replace wood. And we'll never run out of it, unless we burn it all down, which is a whole 'nother topic.
The Tree Farm as the Right Thing to Do
TM: It [the tree farm] does live in my heart. It's the place where I focused my whole working career on bringing it back. I spent, in retrospect, probably too much time trying to make the tree farm be what it could be because, in my belief it was the right thing to do. It was my family's, who I absolutely adore every member of, and I loved working for them. That's a special thing about a family business as opposed to a publicly-owned company.
But nothing happens quickly other than the actual cutting of a tree. Nothing happens quickly in the forest. So, you have to spiritually commit over your whole time you're gonna be doing this, that this is your focus, this is what you wanna do.
It's not nearly as dramatic today as it was then when these guys came into the middle of nowhere with these huge trees and had to figure out a way to move them and get them to market. So to a certain extent, in my case, I'm just carrying on a family cultural tradition, if you will.
