Lumber yard closes here

WAUSA -- Viking Lumber is closing its doors here.

An ad in this week’s Gazette notes the local lumber yard is closing “due to high lumber prices and material delays.”

The lumber yard has had a long history in Wausa.

Wausa has had a lumber yard nearly since the day the community was founded. The M.W. Blenkiron Company established a lumber yard here in 1890, one of the first businesses houses in town.

The yard established so it would be next to the railroad and along the town’s main street. Prior to the establishment of a lumber yard here, lumber had to be freighted to town from Creighton.

The Coleson-Holmquist Company purchased the lumber yard from the Blenkiron Company in 1909. .In 1943, the company bought their competitors out, the Lundberg Brothers Independent Lumber Company, which was located farther southeast along the railroad right-of-way. Gene Wischoff took over as manager of the local yard in 1972. He left in 1975 when the Coleson-Holmquist company sold the business to Darrel Norman.

In 1981, Norman sold the company to Lowell and Delmar Johnson. The name changed at that time from Wausa Lumber Company to Johnson Lumber and Grain Systems.

Lowell Johnson later sold the business and became known as Viking Lumber.

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