LOCALadk Magazine

H A S E L T O N L U M B E R LOCALadk 14 Living in southern California some 40 years ago, Sam Haselton was going to be Howard Stern. He had the radio contacts, he had the pipes, he came complete with a devil-may-care So-Cal attitude that had him ripping down the coastal waters in an 18-foot Hobie Cat whenever the winds were treacherous enough for the Coast Guard to issue a small-cra warning. "I was ready, poised, and excited to have a radio career," he said. en came the phone call. It was his dad, Charles, instructing him to come back East to help operate Haselton Lumber, a business that had been established in 1901 by a family that had settled the area a century before that. Giving up a world of surf boards for a world of pine boards struck him as something on the edge of insanity. "I hung up on him the first couple of times," Haselton said. "But he can be persistent." So can the call of history. From his office, Haselton can see it all: the vintage mill buildings, weathered by the years but still standing; the 1917 one-cylinder Fairbanks-Morse 6 horsepower Model Z engine that was hauled around the community to saw not just logs, but ice; a museum's worth of memorabilia; and maybe most notable of all, the handwritten note from his grandfather Willard to his father on Haselton Lumber's incorporation, awarding Charles shares in the company, with the reminder, "We would like you to be fair to the other fellow." e "other fellow" is the customer, and as Haselton celebrates its 120th anniversary, the handwritten notation on a scrap of paper has become the company's calling card. "A woman came in here with a picture frame that needed to be repaired," Haselton recalled. "We don't do that here, but we weren't going to tell her no." So Haselton himself went down to the mill building and fabricated the needed piece. Unlike most Adirondack lumberyards, Haselton doesn't maintain 4TH GENERATION STORY Story by Tim Rowland

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