Once upon a time, there were lumberyards everywhere in Austin.

Nine of them, at least.

New homes were built everywhere and many of them were do-it-yourself projects.

The Hormel Foods Corporation Austin plant's work force was never larger. Wages were good. Interest rates were cheap. So were lots. Building materials were inexpensive. A different generation had more skills. Home designs were not as elaborate as they are today. After work, the enterprising home builder and a handful of his friends from work would get together to hammer out a home.

A home could be built in just a few weeks that satisfied a family for years, even decades, to come.

Austin neighborhoods are dotted with them today.

Dick Buechner and Dewey Noel remember those days and so does Harold W. Mattfeld.

"They built 200 homes a year in those days in Austin," said Buechner. "I remember one year they built 260. It was a different time and a different Austin. The bottom fell out of the home-building market by 1961, when they built only 25 new homes, but in the 1950s there was a real building boom going on in this town."

During the 1940s, World War II caused rationing and among the items needed was "good lumber," as Buechner described it.

When World War II ended and American GIs returned home, they settled down into their communities, married and had a family. And, built a house.

"The interest rate might have been 4 percent in those days and you could build a house in the 1950s for only $7,500," said Buechner.

"It might have cost $11,000 to build a good story-and-a-half house, but that a payment of only, maybe, $32 a month on a 20- or 30-year

mortgage for an average-priced house," added Noel. "You couldn't afford not to build a new home in those days."

Last year, the city of Austin enjoyed a modern home-building boom, when 61 residential house permits were issued by the department of public works' building department.

Other recent home-building totals were in the teens or twenties and low thirties.

But, 260? Unbelievable. Even the city's public works department does not have archives that far back to verify Buechner's 260 total.

According to their collective memory the nine lumberyards included: Crane; Cashway; Howley, owned by brothers Cy and Bill Hawley; Botsford Lumber; Austin Cashway, managed by Mattfeld; Buechner Lumber, Tomlinson Mills (the lumberyard was owned by Ray Buechner and his sons, Dick and Bill); Hiway Sales, owned by Clarence Seibel; Holbrook Lumber and Eclipse Lumber, which was destroyed by fire.

Want proof of the nine lumberyards? Consider this: There were over a dozen contractors.

Buechner and Noel tallied them: Gordian Anderson,

Howard Marsh, Harold Erickson, Chet Weseman, Jordan Builders, Ray Winkels and Len Johnson, John Nybo, Ed Uhlis, Ray Yerhot, Don Schleusner, Elmer McFarland, Jim Christiansen, Ken Hofland and Henry Uschold among others.

Mattfeld, at the age of 91, is the senior member of the lumberyard alumni.

He came to Austin to open a Payless Cashway lumber store that later became part of a successful chain of businesses pioneered by S.M. Furrow and family.

"We were the first do-it-yourself lumber store in town," he said. "We represented a different way of doing business."

Today, United Building Centers, The Home Depot and Lowe's building centers emulate the business strategy started by S. M. Furrow. Ken Retterath's Austin Builders Supply, Inc. may be the closest there is to an old time lumberyard, but even it has an expanded line of merchandise and services.

But, it's undisputable: Austin Payless Cashway Lumber was the first of the new breed of lumberyards.

"We had paint, we had tools, we had cabinets and other built-ins. It was the Furrow family's way of doing business: offer them everything they needed to build something," said Mattfeld.

The Cashway lumberyard along Old Highway 218 North (Mower County Highway 45) constructed its own rail spur line in the days when lumber materials were transported by rail. Today, the UBC operates from the location.

"Our stores were all over the country by that time," he said of the Furrow family's success with its Cashway building centers.

Not even a destructive arson fire in November 1965 could stop the Cashway lumberyard. It occurred on a Thursday night and by the following Monday morning, contractors Winkels and Johnson

were at work, replacing three buildings, a warehouse and an office -- so concerned were the owners their competition would push them aside.

The Cashway business opened in May 1952 and served customers in a 100-mile radius of Austin. It lasted until the mid-1970s, when the business was sold.

Mattfeld retired earlier in 1971. He remembers how garages, sheds, farm buildings and homes were popping up all over the area.

But, the industry may have been its own worst enemy. Many of the original lumberyards ceased to operate as the 1950s became the 1960s.

One-by-one, the lumberyards dwindled in number, according to Mattfeld. The Eclipse lumberyard burned to the ground in 1956.

Ralph Crane and his son, Rayce, Fay Rayman, the Howley and Buechner families and other famous names in the business world gave way to new owners. Sons took over for fathers.

"Everything changed," said the man everyone knows as "Matt."

"But in its heyday, Austin was a busy, bustling place. Very progressive and in need of the building supplies to put up all the buildings and homes people wanted."

Those were the days all right, when the real building boom echoed all over Austin and changed the cityscape forever.

Lee Bonorden can be contacted at 434-2232 or by e-mail at

lee.bonorden@austindailyherald.com