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B.J. Carney & Co. was a major producer of western red cedar and lodgepole pine utility poles, with its primary market the government and utility companies of the eastern provinces and states. Carney Pole Co. was established by B.J. Carney and Milo Flannery in Grinnel, Iowa in 1905, and incorporated in 1915 as B.J.Carney & Co. The head office was moved to Spokane, Washington in 1927, with a branch office in Minneapolis, Minnesota, at which time Milo Flannery became the controlling principal.

B.J. Carney Pole Co. initiated its operations in western Canada in 1908 in Chase, and opened a branch office in Sicamous. In 1914, attracted by the straight cedar in the Kingfisher and Shuswap areas, Carney Pole hired Pat Keron to scout around the North Okanagan. He proceeded to open an office in the Bell Block on Cliff Street in Enderby. In 1925 the office was moved to the former office of Okanagan Sawmills on Old Vernon Road, and became the head office for the Canadian operations in 1926.

Manager Keron quickly established pole yards in Grindrod and in Enderby, purchasing the Enderby property north of the bridge from A.C. Skaling in 1926. Both yards were ideally located between the Shuswap River and the CPR Railroad, the two primary means of transporting the poles.

H.M. Walker, in 1925, reported in the local paper that the pole industry had replaced sawmilling as the main industry:

"When the lumber mill shut down, the pole business picked up, and for the past two years this has been the main source of revenue for many of our citizens...the Carney Company pays to Clark & Elliott, who handle the poles and run the camps, in the neighborhood of $4000 a month...According to figures given us by manager Keron, about twenty per cent of the poles handled by his company come from farmers in the course of land clearing...400 carloads of poles are shipped annually by this company." 
Enderby Commoner, April 16, 1925

In 1928 Pat Keron accepted a job with R.W. Bruhn of Sicamous; he was replaced by his accountant Percy Farmer, who remained with the company until 1965. The new manager was assisted in the office by Marion Lantz Baird (nee Threatful) from 1928-1931, and worked alone until 1949.

B.J. Carney shipped most of its poles by rail to the prairie provinces for the construction of hydro-electric power and lighting installations. There were numerous problems with shipping poles by truck in the B.C. interior, as evidenced in 1931 when B.J. Carney shipped 1200 poles to Kelowna:

"Last week shipments of poles were started from the Enderby yards of B.J. Carney & Co. to Kelowna district, to be used in construction of new hydro-electric lines by the West Kootenay Light and Power Company. These poles are loaded onto trucks, ten poles to the load. Each of the forty-foot poles weighs half a ton. A five ton load in addition to the weight of the truck. Travelling from Enderby to Kelowna, a distance of say 60 miles, will put the light-surfaced roads to a severe test.

"Twelve hundred poles are to be moved. One trip a day for three trucks, for one month and a half--120 loads in all. Should the roads freeze hard, they might hold up, but if soft weather follows the present cold snap, it will cost the government many thousands of dollars to repair the 60 miles of road... It will be interesting to see the effect of this heavy traffic on the dirt roads between here and Kelowna."  Enderby Commoner, November 19, 1931

The cedar poles averaged 40 feet in length, although occasionally the company would receive an order for smaller 25 foot poles in Alberta or 70 foot poles for the Ontario Hydro towers. Pilings were often ordered for special projects: "Two double cars of pilings were taken from Carney's yards at Enderby Sunday night by the CPR to be used in building a new bridge at Penticton." (Enderby Commoner, January 31, 1935) Ties, hand-hewn by local contractors, and cedar posts were also sold to the CPR.

B.J. Carney & Co in Enderby had many local contractors to supply their poles. In the early years Clarke & Elliot, and later Clarke & Lantz, operated their own pole camps and shipped poles to Carney's. The Enderby office listed 104 independent contractors in a 1949 memorandum; approximately half of these were from the Enderby district and half from the Salmon Arm/Sicamous area, with a very few from Nakusp. In the 1950s Baird Bros. supplied many of the poles. Audrey Baird described the operation in the bush:

"Oh, we took a lot of poles out of Cooke Creek. It can have some rot in it for a log. But the pole's got to be perfectly sound. It's got to be straight. It's got to be a certain size round and certain top and certain butt. And it comes in certain classes...In those days we made them right in the bush..we peeled them in the bush and skidded most of the poles with horses. I'd have a man--or do it myself--go around and check the poles, to see if they were good; if they made a cull pole, we'd have to cut some off, five feet of it, ten feet off of it. Or if they made them too small of a top or whatever. We don't do that now. We take them out with the bark on them and ship them out to the pole yards and they put them through the peeler. There's not that many poles taken out today because there isn't that kind of cedar."

The Shuswap River was used by the farmers and loggers in the Mabel Lake and Trinity areas to drive their poles to Carney's yard in Enderby. Some of the larger runs were owned by Henry & Wilfred Simard, Walter Dale, Rudolph and Napoleon Simard, Abe Helps, and Audrey Baird.

B.J. Carney often financed a truck or a timber sale for these contractors, crediting their account towards the receipt of poles. In 1945, for example, they helped to finance Audrey Baird's first logging truck, as well as his second truck the following year. In 1949, according to their balance sheet, the company's advances to contractors totalled $159,206.72, over one-quarter of their total Current Assets. Harold Palmer commented:

"I made a lot of advances to contractors; they would want an advance to work on them. Alec Jones for instance. He frequently wanted an advance. But he was one Indian you could rely on. He came in and said 'could I have a thousand dollars', til he got this bunch of poles. That's all he needed to do was ask and I'd give it to him. Never lost a nickel with him...Practically everybody on the Mabel Lake Road had an advance at one time or another."

In 1951 B.J. Carney purchased a large timber sale with Armstrong Sawmills in the Cooke Creek area. Baird Bros. were contracted to do the logging, with the logs going to the mill and the poles to Carney's. Audrey Baird explained:

"Carney's had a cruiser from Spokane come in and look through all that timber up there and they were interested in it. They wanted us to look at the idea of logging it for them and putting a road in. So in '48 Alex Jones, half-breed here, he knew the mountains pretty good. He and I started out from the Kingfisher and we spent the night sleeping in the hills there, and we came over from Raboch's place, took the old fire trails to Grassy Lake and we came across the top and spent that night up in the hills...we looked at all the timber we were interested in. Then we came out down the Cooke Creek, at Potrie's. It took us two days looking at the timber. Then they had it put up for sale...It was a big sale. The sale belonged to Carney Pole Company and Armstrong Sawmills between them. They were financing us, but we did the whole deal for them. The first timber sale was not like things are now...thirty-two hundred and some acres in one sale...I built the Cooke Creek Road in1951.."

Many customers required the poles to be preserved. Depending on the final destination, B.J. Carney's poles were either sent to Carney's treating plant, Canada Cedar Pole Preservers at Galloway in the Kootenays, to Northern Wood Preservers in Port Arthur, or to Canada Creosoting Co. in Calgary and New Westminster. In 1946, because of the war, the pole companies in Canada experienced a shortage of creosote oil in addition to a shortage of labour and railroad cars. In a letter to the Minneapolis office from Spokane, Milo Flannery directed:

"Today we received a wire from Canada Creosoting Company stating that they cannot treat anymore poles for the time being. We understand that Bell at Lumby had to close down. Please ship Galloway another car of creosote as this is about the only plant left in Canada running. If we don't keep this plant treating we are not going to be able to get enough export permits to keep shipping cedar to you...We suggest you ship the Galloway car from Chicago as we don't want Canada Creosoting to know where we are getting the oil."  September 11, 1946

B.J. Carney's office in Spokane handled most of the sales, which were to the eastern provinces and states. As Harold Palmer pointed out:

"Carney's sold very little poles in this district, because it cost too much to have the poles sent down to Galloway to be treated, then bring them back. Whereas our chief competition, Bell Pole had their own plant here. They could treat poles here and supply them to Hydro and B.C. Tel...We couldn't send them there to have them treated and bring them back here to be used locally. It would be too expensive."

Carney's regular Canadian customers included Hydro Quebec, Ontario Hydro, Manitoba Power, Saskatchewan Power Corporation, Alberta Telephone, and Calgary Power. They sold shorter poles to municipalities in the prairie provinces for rural electrification. Many of the poles were shipped to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where Carney had a large holding yard and treatment plant, and some of the poles went to their yard at Spokane.

In 1942 the newspaper reported that "B.J. Carney & Co. shipped 347 carloads during the year, to a value of $148,191.08 from the Enderby office. Practically all of this went to U.S. points." (Enderby Commoner, January 8, 1942) In that same year the Canadian government created a Foreign Exchange Board, which immediately implemented export permits for cedar poles. In 1946 a quota was established: one carload of cedar poles shipped to the United States had to be balanced by one shipped to Canada. The company responded by shipping more pine, larch, and fir. The quotas were rescinded in 1949, at which time a number of small pole companies began to flood the market and pole prices dropped.

In the spring of 1949, R.W. Bruhn Ltd. of Sicamous liquidated their business. Federated Co-op at Canoe purchased the logging and sawmill portion of the business, while Carney agreed to purchase the pole, post, piling and tie operations. Harold Palmer, accountant, and P. Westman, woods foreman, joined the B.J.Carney office in Enderby.

Carney inherited a very large tie contract with the CPR from the Bruhn deal. The company purchased large numbers of hand-hewn ties from the Scandinavian loggers around Shuswap Lake, hauling them out of the lake with a custom-made machine, to fill this order. The Bruhn deal also included a number of timber sales around Shuswap Lake. Carney built a diesel tug in 1952, the MPF (Milo Patrick Flannery), to boom the poles on the lake; Eino Mackie ran it for many years.

In 1945 B.J. Carney & Co. purchased the office building they had been renting, the former Okanagan Sawmills office. The company paid the City of Enderby $300, with the promise to renovate the derelict structure to appease the fire marshall. It was renovated in 1952 by Leo Schulte, and remained the Canadian head office of B.J. Carney & Co. Ltd. until 1990.

The Foreign Exchange Board was not pleased with the export of poles and capital to Spokane and for 9 years they pressured B.J. Carney & Co. to establish its own company in Canada. On March 10, 1952, the Canadian branch was officially incorporated as B.J. Carney & Co., Ltd. Shareholders were essentially those of the parent company: Milo Flannery, president; Francis Flannery, vice-president; Percy Farmer, secretary-treasurer, and C.W. Morrow and Jack Nevin directors.

Percy Farmer, as manager of the Canadian company, was responsible for production and sales. During this time Carney had yards in Enderby, Grindrod, Armstrong, Lumby, Malakwa, Canoe, Shuswap, Sicamous, Golden, Nakusp, Salmo, Lardeau, Grand Forks, Barriere, Boston Bar, and Galloway. The manager kept an accurate inventory of each yard, ready to move poles when required.

Francis Flannery succeeded his uncle Milo Flannery in 1957 as president of B.J. Carney & Co. He travelled from Spokane to Enderby 3 to 4 times each year to consult with Percy, and to visit the various yards with him. Francis continued to determine the prices for buying and selling, and controlled most of the sales.

Marion Lantz Baird re-joined the office in 1950 at the request of the manager, to work as bookkeeper and stenographer. She worked with Percy to price the inspection slips and maintain stock reports. She handled the contractor's accounts, the bills of lading, the export and customs papers. She found that correspondence was minimal, as most business was conducted by phone or telegram. Marion commented that Carney was always generous in their salaries to the Enderby office, with wages comparable with the Spokane office.

The accountant, Harold Palmer, was responsible for payrolls in the Enderby, Nakusp, and Sicamous offices. He created monthly and yearly balances sheets and maintained the numerous ledgers. He commented that "we used to have huge freight bills. Imagine a carload of poles from here to Quebec for instance. We had one bank account that was just the freight account."

With the opening of the Cooke Creek area, pole production was at its peak during the 1950s in the Enderby district. But by 1962 Carney's began to feel real competition with local pole buyers such as Malpass and Danforth as the cedar supply began to weaken. They also found themselves competing with the lumber companies for cedar for the first time, as cedar panelling and cedar lumber became popular. Cutting quotas were introduced by the Ministry of Forests in 1961, and Carney over cut its first year. Rail prices increased dramatically, and the company began to consider trucking as an alternative to rail.

In 1966 Percy Farmer retired, and Bud Shantz became the new manager in Enderby. The company closed the Enderby pole yard, leasing it to Gerald Raboch and Riverside Sawmill. Harold Palmer explained:

"They closed the yard in Enderby, and put in a big yard up at Sicamous, and an old peeling machine. At that time we were getting most of the poles from the Revelstoke region. They were pretty well gone around the lake, and they were all gone up Mabel Lake way. It wasn't worth having a pole yard in Enderby."

This proved to be true for most of the pole yards; by 1973 the company was only insuring the yards at Sicamous, Galloway, and Nakusp, and confining its pole purchases to the Revelstoke, Sicamous, and Nakusp areas.

Change was inevitable. In the Enderby office, Marion Baird retired in 1972, followed by Harold Palmer in 1973. They could both remember when the poles were peeled and sized in the bush; now they are shipped to a peeling machine in Sicamous. They could remember when pole drives covered the length of the Shuswap River; now the poles are easily transported by truck. They could remember loading the railroad cars and paying the freight charges; now the poles are shipped by truck. They could remember the hand-hewn tie; now they are easily sawn. They could remember when poles were partially treated; now they are usually full-length treated. They could remember when Carney's yards held strictly cedar poles; now three-quarters of the poles are fir, pine, or larch.

Prices, costs, and production fluctuated through the 1970s and 1980s. The Enderby office was closed in 1990, when B.J. Carney & Co. Ltd. consolidated its main office and pole yard in Sicamous. The management moved with the office: general manager is Jack Herman, assisted by John Shantz, Jack Prokopetz, Rosie Tokairin, and Merv Herman. The company continues to have yards and offices in Nakusp and Galloway. And they continue to provide utility poles to government and utility companies.

Bibliography:
B.J. Carney & Co. fonds. 1943 - 1981
Audrey Baird, an interview on September 7, 1989
Marion Baird, interviews on September 11, 1989; January 22, 1993
Harold Palmer, an interview on March 1, 1992
Okanagan Commoner, 1918-1930
Enderby Commoner, 1930 - 1990