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Most lumber in the United States comes from logging forests, with sawmills churning out standard sizes of boards from a small variety of trees. Urban salvage takes a different path: collecting wood from trees that have been declared a hazard or knocked down due to development. This is difficult work, because each tree is unique. Many bear the marks of having lived in a city, such as nails, embedded fence posts, and even scraps of electrical wires. The Dee Mill’s main sawyer, Kevin, likes to say, “We get what we get!” which is so true when talking about urban salvage. This makes The Dee Mill less of an assembly-line operation and more of an ever-adapting craft studio. It’s a family enterprise. Chris is an expert arborist and crane operator. His wife, Sharolyn, a trained welder and The Dee Mill co-owner, fabricates steel table legs and metal structures. Two of their four kids, Jacks and Liam, also work at the mill, doing whatever needs to be done on any given day.

The artist couple met in Idaho, and together, Sharolyn and Chris have built some truly wild large-scale sculptures, such as a famous 10-foot-wide Idaho potato that tours the country. They both see their approach to reusing salvaged trees as an artistic appreciation of the material.

“My favorite part of the process is seeing what’s inside a tree trunk and figuring out what it could become with a little work,” says Sharolyn. “I think it’s fascinating because you can see the story of how the tree grew up. You can see mineral streaks, growth rings, scars and nails from a treehouse. We’ve even found bones and golf balls embedded in the slabs. Each tree is absorbing everything around it. When we slice into it, we’re like, ‘Whoa!’—every time.”

Many of the products the team at The Dee Mill creates feature the unique characteristics and figures within the trees, like tabletops with natural edges and beautiful grain flow.

“Every tree tells the story of its entire life. For us at the mill, that’s really meaningful,” says Chris Riedl, who was the The Dee Mill’s on-site manager until January 2024. “In modern-day life, I think we’re becoming less and less connected. I think people are ready to rekindle that relationship with the things they use every day.”

The incense cedar that was cut down after the Portland windstorm now sits in an enormous kiln. The wood has to dry out for six months to two years before the team can slice sections and transform them into dimensional lumber, charcuterie boards, mantles, and tabletops. In 2023, the team opened a storefront in downtown Hood River, so locals can stop in, admire the wood, and take some home.

When they worked as sculptors back in Idaho, Chris Schofield also made a living as an arborist, running his own tree service. “We’re artists who don’t always have enough artwork to pay the bills,” he says. He was appalled at how often trees would go to waste, watching them get cut down to make way for a new subdivision and seeing most of the wood end up at the landfill. He ended up bringing many of the logs home, piling them up in the driveway, and eventually, got a sawmill. Chris and Sharolyn moved to Oregon in 2020—bringing the logs and slabs they’d collected over the years—and partnered with a local landowner to start The Dee Mill and turn it into an urban salvage operation.

The history of The Dee Mill mirrors the history of logging in the Pacific Northwest. The Oregon Lumber Company started the logging mill in 1906 and built a company town, Dee, to house hundreds of workers. But as the lumber industry collapsed, Dee emptied out. The mill was sold to various different owners and eventually closed. It burned down in 1996. In reopening The Dee Mill as an urban salvage mill, Chris and Sharolyn hope to bring life back into the area.

“Out here in Hood River, if you bring up The Dee Mill, people will say, ‘My gran used to work there,’” says Chris. “Our mill is a team. It’s not about any one of us, it’s about all of us.”