Editor’s note: This is the last in a two-day series of columns about the first women to work permanently in Bend’s lumber mills.

In 1974, the Brooks-Scanlon mill was almost three decades away from becoming a movie theater and shopping mall. It was a bustling stretch of riverfront, dotted with buildings that churned logs into lumber.

“When we shut the mill down, there were people who had never been to the other side of the mill,” says Dave Miller, who worked for Bend’s largest employer from 1966 until it closed in 1993.

In one tiny room, Anne Carlson and Liz Stockdale — the first women to be hired permanently in the mill — repaired long sticks that separated lumber in the drying kilns.

Soon, Carlson was offered a job on the day shift. She jumped at the better hours, even though it meant slightly less pay. Then she learned what the job entailed.

She was paired with a young man named Larry. Together, they lifted and stacked green railroad ties. For eight hours. Every day.

At first, other mill workers snickered. How could a tiny 20-year-old woman — just five feet, four inches and 125 pounds — lift such heavy logs, day in and day out?

Stacking green railroad ties was a typical starting job to break into the mill’s day shift. Newbies would do it for a week or two, then get reassigned. But weeks turned into months and Carlson never got a break. She just kept stacking.

Each evening, she went home and cried tears of exhaustion as she crawled into bed. Her husband brought her something to eat and she didn’t get up until it was time to return to work.

The men at the mill began to soften. They respected that Carlson kept showing up each day for such grueling work. They felt bad for her.

Eventually, they begged management to reassign her. She was asked to do clean-up in the small mill — the same position Stockdale had recently accepted.

Logs eight to 10 feet long and up to 12 inches in diameter were shaved and shaped as they traversed the second floor of the mill by conveyor system. Occasionally, wood fell off the belt. The clean-up crew was tasked with clearing it from the floor and sliding it down chutes positioned around the room, into a chipper.

On Stockdale’s first day, a large log bumped off the conveyor belt.

At five feet, six inches and almost 200 pounds, Stockdale was big and strong. So she wrestled the log upright and started hopping it toward a chute. Then she looked around. Everyone had stopped working to stare at her, mouths agape.

“Oh my God, woman! Don’t lift those up!” her supervisor yelled.

He handed her a chain saw and instructed her to cut the log into pieces and roll those to the chutes.

When Stockdale was later promoted to a different position in the mill, her reputation preceded her.

“Oh, you’re the one who walked the whole (log) to the chutes!” her new co-workers exclaimed.

Carlson quit the mill four years after she started, upon the birth of her first baby. Today, she’s a childbirth instructor.

For Stockdale, the mill became a career. She was promoted to pulling chain — a skilled job of directing sawed and graded wood into various wells, like a giant, real-life version of the game Tetris.

She worked there until she was laid off as the mill began to shut down. By then, dozens of women worked in the mill.

Stockdale found work at Ochoco Lumber in Prineville. When that mill closed, she moved to Idaho, returning to Bend just a few years ago.

Both women think fondly of their early mill days. They swoon at the smell of freshly cut green wood. And Carlson regrets that she didn’t keep her hard hat as a souvenir.

“We proved ourselves,” Stockdale says. “And they hired more women because of us.”