The Birth of 2x4 Lumber - 3 Mechanic Street

Dennis Lane started out as a sawmill operator in Barre, but he was also an inventor, and a tinkerer. He kept adjusting and tweaking the machinery until he finally came up with a new technology he patented as the Lever Cut Circular Saw Mill. With that, he got out of the business of operating a sawmill and into the business of manufacturing them.

Dennis went into business with Colonel Perley Pitkin, who you might remember from Tour #2 as the fire chief and principal hero in the battle to contain Montpelier’s 1875 fire. These two were later joined by local attorney John Brock, and they formed the Lane Manufacturing Company to build state-of-the-art sawmill machinery. They purchased the long brick building you see arranged to the right along the riverside, which had been the iron forge operated by Alfred Wainwright. Their headquarters office was on the site of this building on the left with the surrounding covered porch. The community building that’s here now was completed in 1980 but was constructed to imitate the features of the 1870 original.

The business was a roaring success. The patented Lane technology was the first to provide lumber of a consistent thickness. It featured a mechanical method for propelling the log through the blade, and it quickly became the nationwide, and then global, standard. It might be fair to say that the two-by-fours found in every wood-framed house in the world were first made possible by Dennis Lane.

Tragically, Lane died in 1888, just as the company was reaching the height of its success. He never knew that one of his circular sawmills was shipped four thousand miles up the Amazon River in Peru, or that others made their way to every corner of the globe, from Chile to Sweden to Alaska and all points in between. Under the stewardship of his partners, the business continued on and was picked up by a second generation, but with the Great Depression, it fell on hard times and never really recovered. The company closed in 1961 and the building remained deserted and increasingly derelict for many years.

A Glorious Renaissance
During a brief spell in the 1970s, the second floor of the building across from the community building served as a dance club called Blackie Stone’s Industrial Revolution, and it was about as sketchy as it sounds. Also, in the 1970s, Dennis Lane’s great-grandson reopened part of the plant to manufacture replacement parts for the sawmills, some of which are still in operation to this day. That business succumbed to fire in the late 70s, and shortly after that, the entire complex underwent a glorious renaissance when it was developed into the residential area you see now.

The riverside condominiums are in the original main machine shop of Lane Manufacturing. This is such a charming and obviously desirable neighborhood that you might think it’s a spot meant for people with lots of disposable income, but in fact, it is managed by the Montpelier Housing Authority, with apartments rented to senior citizens at subsidized rates.