Stirling City Museum maintains history of former logging town
STIRLING CITY — In a northern Butte County hamlet, the air is fresh, and fragrant due to its proximity to the forests. The peace is broken only by the occasional motor vehicle moving along the road.
It definitely hasn’t always been this quiet. In fact, Stirling City was a busy little place for several decades as its mill processed timber that would end up as matches for a society that smoked a lot of tobacco and had mostly wood-burning stoves and needed a way to light those fires.
Stirling City only has about 300 residents these days, a huge difference from the time when several hundred people in town supported a forestry-based industry. That history and spirit are what the docents of the Stirling City Museum seek to keep alive in the well-organized and spotless facility in an old U.S. Forest Service ranger’s office and home.
Saturday kicked off the opening weekend for the museum, which will welcome guests again today from 11 a.m. until 3 p.m. Pleasant conditions around 70 degrees with a gentle wind greeted visitors, who heard historical tidbits about the area from well-versed docents.
Ed Chombeau was one such docent, and he knew the museum intimately. He started the tour by showing off a scale replica of the town’s former mill; the museum association’s president, Pete Cuming, painstakingly created it by hand and debuted the display in 2009. It shows the rail lines and other infrastructure necessary to process the raw timber trains delivered from the nearby forests.
“Making matches was good business,” Chombeau explained. “Everyone was dependent on matches” when the Diamond Match Company began operations in the area in 1905.
Stirling City’s mill burned in 1958, and a smaller operation continued until 1974; the match operations ended in 1975.
“Butane lighters really caused a drop in the need for matches,” Chombeau said.
The building in the former ranger’s office houses what Chombeau called the “mill room” and the “rail room” — the latter of which contains interpretive displays about the Butte County Railroad, which served Chico at its valley end and Stirling City and smaller logging settlements feeding the mill.
The “rail room” also features a map of the logging railroad as well as the stops along the route — some of them still in existence, others not — where the train would stop. Paradise, Magalia and Butte Meadows were among them.
Chombeau’s wife, Glenda, led a tour of the ranger’s residence, a two-story house which now has a display of some sort in nearly every downstairs room. The kitchen, for example, has items and furnishings offering a good idea of how the place would’ve looked in the 1950s and earlier. A bedroom has artifacts, photos, a display of Victorian handkerchiefs, and a map showing “Little Italy,” an area of Stirling City where loggers of Italian ancestry lived during the town’s boom years. The area is where Merlo Park is now located, a few blocks’ distance from the museum.
Slow going
Glenda Chombeau said she was surprised how few visitors had come to the museum for opening day by late Saturday morning.
“We don’t have a lot of docents,” she explained, adding that it’s the reason the museum isn’t open regularly anymore. “We used to be open every weekend, but not since the (2018 Camp) fire.”
Cuming, the museum group’s president, said he, too, was surprised by the low attendance and that he hoped today would be better.
“We were hoping we’d have a heck of a lot more people than this,” he said with a sigh. In the meantime, he gave a tour of the garage-style building behind the museum; it housed historical saws, logging gear, a water pipe made from redwood, and an iron collection donated by Bob and Dot Moore.
Some of the irons were simple, and the user would heat them by placing them directly on a fire or stove. A couple of them were quite advanced for their time, employing gasoline to produce a small flame against the ironing surface, much the way modern barbecues emit flames from small pipes inside the units.
If it was a way of downing or moving trees for processing in the mill, Cuming probably can show a photo or diagram of it and explain how it all worked.
The museum is open for special occasions, such as pre-arranged group showings. Those interested should contact the Stirling City Historical Society by calling (530) 873-1598.
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