"Hardboard is one of those products that is found—or has been found—just about everywhere. In recent years, it’s been overshadowed by MDF and thin particleboard—or even stiff, industrial-type paperboard. 

It was my very welcome experience to participate in the development of this versatile member of the composite panel family. A lot of R&D and trial and error was carried out by hardboard entrepreneurs up and down the US West Coast states, building on the experience of Masonite and their pioneering mill in Laurel, Mississippi. They didn’t use resin but exploded chips with “guns” to make fibers. When Masonite installed their plant at Ukiah, California, they used redwood and Doug-fir, which required phenolic resin as the binder. I filled many tank-carload orders from them (before my competitors caught up).

Weyerhaeuser was going to use their own resin for their Klamath Falls, Oregon, hardboard mill (in the yellow pine region), but I “talked them out of it” and enrolled them as a customer for many years. Another Oregon mill, Dee Hardboard on the northern slopes of Mount Hood, started out using whole wood with the resins in the bark providing the binder---a development by Messrs. Bill Runckel and Art Anderson; but the bark bits plugged up the screens quickly. That prompted a switch to commercial resins and they became steady clients for years.

One other NW mill was Anacortes (Washington) Plywood using a process developed by the Plywood Research Foundation. The goal was to use the hardboard as a face for their plywood. A mill in Coos Bay, Oregon used the same idea.

Hardboard really took off over the years, with other plants notable in their own right at Corvallis, Pilot Rock and Forest Grove, Oregon. I look back upon this era as a legendary chapter in the development of the composite panel industry."