The Company Owned Every House in Town. Then Wall Street Bought the Company. Scotia, California

Until 2017, not one person in Scotia, California owned the house they lived in. The Pacific Lumber Company owned all 274 of them — plus the theatre, the hospital, the store, the bank, the hotel, the water system, the power plant, the streets and the fire department. Every other company town in this series was killed by a dying industry. Scotia wasn't. In 1985 Pacific Lumber was healthy: 200,000 acres of redwood, almost no debt, an overfunded pension, and a habit of cutting its forest at about half the rate it could have. Then a Houston financier borrowed $450 million in junk bonds and bought it. Five months later the pension plan was terminated and $62 million of surplus was taken out of it. Within two years the annual cut had doubled. This is the archival history of Scotia — the mill, the town, the takeover, the pension, the timber wars, and the argument over whether any of it was really the takeover's fault. CHAPTERS 0:00 Cold open 1:37 Forestville 4:07 Two Hundred and Seventy-Four Houses 7:15 A Hundred and Twenty Million Board Feet 10:09 October 1985 13:07 The Thirty-First of March 16:24 Two Hundred and Fifty 19:26 The Woods 23:52 Stafford 26:24 The Argument 30:03 What the Company Left 33:26 June 2017 SOURCES Kayes v. Pacific Lumber Co., 51 F.3d 1449 (9th Cir. 1995); EPIC v. California Dept. of Forestry (2008) 44 Cal.4th 459; In re The Pacific Lumber Co., 584 F.3d 229 (5th Cir. 2009); FDIC v. Hurwitz (5th Cir. 2008); Maxxam Group Inc. SEC filings; California Legislative Analyst's Office; State Water Resources Control Board Order WQ 2001-14; Bureau of Land Management; Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division; Scotia Historic Assessment Study (2007); DeAngelo & DeAngelo, Journal of Financial Economics 47(1), 1998; TIME; Texas Monthly; North Coast Journal. Archival photographs are public domain. Modern photography from the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress. Some illustrative plates are generated and rendered in a non-photographic style so they cannot be mistaken for archival material. No image of any person in this film is generated. #Scotia #CompanyTown #Redwoods #PacificLumber #AmericanHistory