Briarmont Township
| Briarmont Township |
Set along the Northern California coastline, Briarmont is a town shaped by redwoods, salt air and time.
What began as a logging camp in the 19th century has grown into a coastal community where historic mill buildings stand alongside cafés, galleries and the expanding campus of Oakridge College. The harbor no longer ships timber, though the town still runs down to it, and its mornings now go to research vessels and passing fog.
Where it is
Briarmont is on the stretch of the north coast people call the Ashenfall region, and it has been the seat of Hartwell County since the county was formed in 1872. Until 1911 most of the wages in town came from the mill.
How it is run
Briarmont Township and Hartwell County share one code, the Municipal Code. Its ordinances apply county-wide unless they say otherwise, and anyone who lives in Hartwell County is a citizen of the township.
Town Hall has the mayor and the town council, and the Hartwell County Clerk keeps the records there. Cases go to the county courts, which sit in town. Law enforcement is the Hartwell County Sheriff's Department. The Briarmont Fire Department began as a bucket brigade, the Goodwill Hose & Bucket Company No. 1, and now covers the township, the mountain communities, state forest land and the highway corridors. The college's Health students learn much of their work at Hartwell General Hospital.
Life in town
Several of the cafés in the old mill buildings opened after Seth Lathrop's crew had laid new floors and rebuilt the sash windows. The Briarmont Improvement Club keeps the flower beds outside Town Hall, and The Hartwell County Courier comes out every week with the tide table on its back page.
Hartwell Manor, up on the rise, is now the college's administration building. The Crenshaw Oak was planted in 1918, the year the Institute opened. Both are in Key Landmarks, with Town Hall, the chapel, the harbor and Astoria Towers.
History
Briarmont began in 1857 as the timber camp of Hartwell Timber Co., founded by Elias Hartwell, and had become a town on mill wages by 1866. His company was sold off for its debts after he died in 1911, and in 1918 the town's trust opened the Oakridge Institute of Forestry and Land Sciences on the estate he left, the school accredited as Oakridge College in 1947. The rest is in the timeline.