The Woodstock Lumber Company, a corporation controlled by the Parker Young Co., built this short, twelve-mile railroad in 1909. The rails traversed the length of the Eastman Brook Valley, east of Woodstock village and supplied a large sawmill on the Pemigewasset River in Woodstock village. The mill was built by Publisher’s Paper Company and then leased to the Woodstock Lumber Company in 1907.  For the first two years, logs were hauled out the woods by teams of horses and dumped into the Pemigewasset River.  Business was good and the railroad was built to increase capacity.

                 Woodstock and Thornton Gore Railroad.  
                            Click on map for larger image.

For motive power there were three Shay geared locomotives used, two of them purchased new. They were all two-truck, 50-ton engines. In the lumberyard at the Woodstock mill, the company used an old 0-4-0, later replaced by another 0-4-0 Rogers 1883 engine. The product hauled by the railroad was almost entirely spruce logs.

In August, 1913 the Woodstock Lumber Co. sawmill, one of the largest sawmills in New England, burned to the ground. A portable sawmill was set up the following to process the remaining logs but the Woodstock & Thornton Gore Raid ceased operation during that year, 1914. It had operated for five years.


    Layout of the millyard of the Woodstock Lumber Co. mill.
                   Click on the layout for a larger image.

Following the fire, Parker Young built a new mill at Beebe River, in Campton.  It was also operated by the Woodstock Lumber Company.
                Click here for photos of the mill and railroad
 
Two of the articles from Outlook Magazine are about the town of Woodstock and both include additional information about this mill.

Fred Brown’s History of Woodstock   by Fred Brown