Painful Change For A Company Town -- In Gilchrist, Ore., Timber Workers' Homes Are Being Marketed As Vacation Getaways

GILCHRIST, Ore. - Like a '30s sepia-toned movie, this central Oregon town - once a little brown timber community - is being colorized.

Little square company houses, in shades of gray, yellow and pale blue, are on the market now. You can pick one up for $52,000 or less and use it for a weekend retreat - hike through ponderosa forests, fish in nearby lakes, ski at Mount Bachelor or shop in Bend, 50 miles north.

Once, Gilchrist Timber Co. rented the houses to workers and painted them a shade of chocolate they called Gilchrist Brown.

The uniform color announced that this was a community where people knew their place.

The big threat to security in Gilchrist turned out to be an East Coast heir to the family-held company, Jean Gilchrist Vance. In 1990, Vance decided to sell her near-majority holdings.

Oregon family members bitterly opposed the sale but were powerless to prevent it.

"I hated the thought of it," says Mary Geales Ernst, the gray-haired daughter of the founder. "We have been in the timber business forever." She still lives in the family compound at Gilchrist.

Ultimately, in 1991, Crown Pacific Ltd. paid $136 million for the town - lock, stock and little houses. Another owner is selling off the houses now. The pretty pastel color scheme is part of the marketing plan.

"We've lost our little brown town," says Ed Hill, 81, who came to Gilchrist from Mississippi with the owners in 1939. "It's not like it used to be."

Hill and his wife, Irene, walk down the wide, near-empty streets now and know few of their neighbors.

Rick Nealeigh, 43, a Milwaukie machinist, and his wife, Linda, are among the new faces.

In August, the Nealeighs paid $45,000 for a two-bedroom Gilchrist house that they intend to use as a weekend getaway.

"It looked relaxing and quiet," he says. "And that is what I need sometimes."

The shift siren - a boat horn brought from Mississippi when the mill was built - sounds four times a day. Otherwise, it's quiet, save for a little traffic noise from nearby U.S. 97.

It's a town from the past - the kind of place city dwellers remember nostalgically. That, too, is part of the marketing plan.

Gilchrist is still very much a timber town. The Crown Pacific mill employs 222 people and probably will continue, because the company has large timber holdings.

Gilchrist's transition comes painfully. For old-time locals, it's like a divorce or a death in the family.

They talk nostalgically of the former company president, Frank R. Gilchrist.

From the beginnings, the Gilchrist family - led by Frank W. Gilchrist and then by his son, Frank R. - let their workers know that the Gilchrists looked out for their people.

"Everyone got so spoiled," says Lucy Breshears, a bartender at the Pine Room Lounge. "When things were tough, the company controlled the grocery store, and everyone got to charge groceries. It was such a way of life that the shock of change was too much for people."

The Gilchrist family had been in the timber business in the East and South for almost a century when it began the move from Mississippi to Oregon in 1937.

Work began on the first of 135 houses in 1938. The company also built the mall and a movie theater. Two churches and two schools also were added.

The little houses formed the core of the town. But the construction plan represented a social plan as well. Workers inhabited the little brown houses. Executives and managers were given larger homes, many of them two-story structures.

The Gilchrist family built its own residential compound, complete with brown lodge-style houses and a tennis court.

"They were all for their people - almost too good to us," Dale Brewer says. "We got used to being babied."

Brewer and his wife, Ruby, paid $36 a month for their three-bedroom house when they moved to Gilchrist in 1951.

Inflation came slowly.

By 1990, when the company was sold, the Brewers were paying $101 a month - about a fifth of the going rate in other central Oregon towns.

"Nobody could read the writing on the wall," Dale Brewer says. "I guess we figured Gilchrist would be forever."

The Gilchrist family did not completely abandon their namesake.

The sale to Crown Pacific allowed four of the younger family members to buy back the houses and the business mall for $500,000.

Suddenly the houses - which had been maintained and priced by the company as a bonus for workers - became an investment that needed to generate a return.

The Brewers' rent - and those of all the houses - doubled, tripled, quadrupled.

By 1997 the Brewers were paying $450 a month - closer to market value but a strain on their budget. Because Gilchrist residents never had invested in real estate when prices were low, they were suddenly paying dearly for the company's past generosity.

The owners, Ernst Brothers Corp., began a $2 million renovation, installing the pastel siding, new roofs and windows.

An elaborate brochure described the town as "a refuge, a holiday destination, a summertime playground, a home."

Because many of the houses were 1,000 square feet or less, the brochure even cited some measurements in cubic feet.

About 60 houses have sold so far - half of them to original residents, who were given a price break.

From the window of their cozy living room in the home they now own, Dale and Ruby Brewer look across the road to a pretty painted house with a new owner.

"We had become so involved with a company family," he says. "You knew everybody in the townsite. You know the kids, their families, their problems. Now we don't know the people who live across the road. They don't want our friendship. It's kind of sad. It's a different situation."