Handbook N-P - Fulton County Public Library

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Under the new arrangement, Howard Utter will continue his saw mill, while Mr. Pike
will also keep nine trucks in his employ.
Complications resulting from excessive taxation was given as one of the main reasons by
Mr. Pike for his retirement from the manufacture of lumber. He stated that his tax bill to the
government last year amounted to $7,200.
Mr. Pike came to Akron ten and a half years ago from Wabash, where he began in the
lumber business on November 29, 1904. During that time he has sold 126 million feet of lumber.
[The News-Sentinel, Friday, June 17, 1938]
COUNTY MAN SERVES ON ADVISORY BOARD
Howard M. Utter, Akron man, left Wednesday for Washington, D. C. where he will
assume a position on the Lumber Advisory Committee of the WPB.
Mr. Utter will represent the D. A. Pike Lumber Co. of Akron. He is one of eight
members from various areas in the United States serving this capacity. He will return to Akron
next week.
[The News-Sentinel, Friday, December 10, 1943]
Jonathan [John S.] Pike acquired a sawmill at Dora. He worked it with a team of oxen.
John S. Pike acquired ownership of a water power sawmill at New Holland in 1853, and the mill,
beginning with 1874, was operated by Mr. Pike’s sons, Albert and Irwin, and still later by Asa
Kindley, son of the builder. In 1865 John S. Pike established a tile factory in New Holland, and its
machinery was operated by horse power. This was the pioneer tile factory in Wabash County, and
so far as records are obtainable it was the first in the state. Then came D. A. Pike, his grandson, a
third generation lumberman, and he incorporated under Indiana laws in 1904.
In 1927 when the crash came, Mr. Pike was building asphalt roads and operating pine
mills in central Florida. He then moved to Akron and re-entered the sawmill business, obtaining
the old Bill Bright sawmill.
In 1933, his daughter, Helen, while only a sophomore at Indiana University, operated a
portable sawmill at Hanna, Indiana, and became the fourth generation of Pikes in the sawmill
business.
Howard Utter married Helen Pike, daughter of D. A. Pike, in January, 1934. Howard had
been learning the lumber business as a lumberjack “in the big north woods.” Together they
operated small portable tie mills in northern Indiana and southern Michigan, while D. A. Pike
continued operating D. A. Pike Lumber Co. at Akron. Both businesses were under the same name
but were separate. In time D. A. phased his business out, and Howard and Helen returned to Akron
where they continued to build the company.
“Our company now has over 100 tree farms,” Howard said in an interview with Ann
Kindig. “We plant more trees than we cut.”
Howard Utter died January 10, 1995. and the business is continued by Howard and Helen
(Pike) Utter’s son, Channing Utter, the fifth generation of the Pike family to be in the sawmill
business.
[Ann Kindig, Rochester Sentinel, Wednesday, December 28, 1994]
SHAMBAUGH’S DEATH ENDS LONG LINK TO AKRON’S
PIKE LUMBER COMPANY
By Ann Allen
‘Them were the good old days,” Jack Shambaugh said in 1995 when asked about his 60year
association with Pike Lumber Company.
It was a statement that carried his memory past sophisticated, state of the art sawmills at
Akron and Carbon to crude Michigan lumber camps where he hewed ties for D. A. Pike Lumber
Company, a firm Helen Pike established in 1933. As the fourth generation of her family to work in
the lumber industry, Pike and a small crew operated a portable sawmill powered by a Rumley