in 1939. Guy found employment with Potlatch Corporation as a utility worker and in
his off-hours would manage his family's 7-acre dairy farm and apple orchard. Since
Guy needed fruit boxes for his orchard, he used his ingenuity and made his own.
Starting with little more than his resourceful and enterprising nature, Guy developed
a sideline business sawing scrap lumber into 'shook' for building fruit boxes to
supply the Lewiston-Clarkston Orchards.
which amounted from 12,000 to 14,000 boxes per
week, that Guy quit the local mill to make them full-
time.
With the coming of World War II, there grew a need for
ammunition boxes. So Guy diversified. By 1950
though, box production was impacted as cardboard
became the material of choice. Again, Guy diversified --
this time into custom lumber milling. The idea was to
buy dimensional lumber green, dry and surface it, then ship it by rail and truck.
and his son Frank began to search for another area mill to purchase. The father-
son partnership ultimately put the Bennett name on mills in Moscow, Troy, and
Princeton, Idaho, with another Clarkston site added in 1966. The once-thriving box
trade shut down entirely in 1968.
