By BETH QUINN

WHITE CITY -- "Burrill Lumber. The Final Chapter. It's over."

That scrawled message inside the main sawmill building greeted 250-plus bidders who showed up Tuesday morning to buy a bit of the Eugene F. Burrill Lumber Co. stud mill at auction.

Some of those bits had been used at other mills over the years.

"I'm reselling this stuff for about the third time, most of it," said auctioneer Roger Ash of Wershow-Ash-Lewis of Tigard.

Before a blue-jeaned and ball-capped crowd of mostly men, Ash paid tribute to Eugene Burrill, who built the Agate Road mill in 1958 and was on hand to see it auctioned piece by piece in 1,852 lots.

"I think he should be complimented for millions and millions of studs in buildings around the world," Ash said.

When it closed earlier this year, the Burrill mill employed 120 people on a $4 million annual payroll and each year produced 50 million board feet of Douglas fir and white fir studs.

The auctioneer's rhythmic cadence Tuesday replaced the roar of saws and edgers as the auction started with the sale of an aluminum tool box. The auction ends tonight with the sale of assorted office furniture and supplies. In between, everything at 8425 Agate Road will go, including barkers and head rigs, chippers and grinders, log bunks and log stackers.

"This mill right here was built from auction," Ash said. "We'll be happy with the total."

The auctioneers sent a two-color brochure to about 12,000 customers throughout the Western hemisphere, and the results of their marketing could be read in the ball caps on display: Mitkof Lumber, Petersburg, Alaska; Fremont Sawmill, Lakeview; Mountain Valley Lumber, Sagvache, Colo.

Brian Dunn flew in from U.S. Forest Industries' stud mill in South Fork, Colo., with a few sale items in mind.

"Some of these guys will get so carried away they'll bid up to twice what it costs new," he said. "You've really got to know what it costs."

Although representatives of Idaho Forest Products and Roseburg Forest Products traded raises on several items, feverish bidding wasn't a problem Tuesday.

Industry hands said the Burrill mill lacked the latest high-tech equipment geared for the smaller logs of the 1990s.

"Any mill that's being auctioned off these days is likely to be one that's not very competitive," said Corvallis forest consultant John Beuter.

Burrill relied on timber from the federal lands managed by the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, whose timber sales nose-dived after the heady days of the 1950s, '60s and '70s.

"Nowadays there's no incentive to stay competitive," Beuter said. "Even if you make the investments, there's no guarantee that the timber's going to be there."

For Ash, the Burrill stud mill is the latest of the 1,000 mills his company has auctioned in the past 40 years. When he started, 50 men would work the green chain at a mill. These days laser-guided sorters do the work of most.