In 1891 the Northwestern Lumber Company from Eau Claire started a big lumber mill at Stanley. Starting in the 1860s, Northwestern had sawed its lumber at its company town Porter's Mills, on the Chippewa River four miles below Eau Claire. But by the early 1890s Northwestern had exhausted its holdings of timber easy to drive down the river. Timber stands still remained on land away from the rivers, so Northwestern switched its model from river-logging to railroad-logging, and shut down Porter's Mills. The company built a new mill at Stanley and spawned the Stanley, Merrill and Phillips Railway to haul logs out of the country to the north and south. (The railway never reached Merrill or Phillips; its furthest reach was Walrath, to the north of Jump River.) The mill in Stanley sawed wood until 1920, when Northwestern's timber holdings in the area were largely exhausted. Over that period, the mill is estimated to have sawed 850 million board feet of lumber.