After settling on a name a next step is sorting out a logo. Ideally I wanted to incorporate something to do with the historical aspects of the name while still conveying that we're primarily a wireless communications engineering company. Aside from the mine, Anchor Hill had a unique fire lookout at the peak which was a tall timber-frame lookout platform built around a live pine tree. I used to take friends up there as a teenager because it was a fun four-wheel drive trip, the views were good, it was the sort of thing you wouldn't see anywhere else, and it seemed like hardly anybody knew it was there. If I could sort out how to incorporate that, it might make a cool logo, although tying in the communications part might be a stretch. Being able to communicate from the lookout to the fire services was critical, and "putting out fires" is what most engineers do, anyway, so that might be workable. Unfortunately, what was left of the lookout burned during the Grizzly Fire in 2002, and I could only locate a few photographs of it. We did manage to turn up an old, grainy scan of the photo shown of the lookout below, but nothing I could find seemed very usable as the basis of a logo.


The Anchor Hill fire lookout, circa 1982 or thereabouts.

Another candidate photo was a shot of the main hoist at the Anchor Mountain mine while it was being built. A workman stood proudly for the photo on top of the hoist and the flat top of the hoist suggested that I could edit a structure on top that would serve as an antenna or something like that. In any case, it looked a bit more workable than the fire lookout. I noticed that the structure of the hoist included the outlines of the letters A and H, so my in-house art and design consultant, Olena Kalayda, sketched up some ideas and I used those as the basis for the photo editing that ultimately turned into the logo. We fully expect this to evolve as the initial version of the logo is just too busy to be generally useful for everything that we'll need it for, but we think it provides some fun and interesting conversation potential. What more can you ask from a logo?



Above is the photo that served as the basis for the logo. This was probably taken in the late 1910's or early 1920's. The photo is marked with the name "Chas Felldhausen" although it is unclear whether that is the name of the workman in the photo or the photographer. The FamilyTreeMaker site does indicate that a Charles Feldhausen died in Deadwood, South Dakota, not far from Anchor Hill, at the age of 90 in 1966. That would have put him around his 40s when the photo was taken, which is very plausible.

My brother, Jeff, pulled together a bunch of research on the Anchor Mountain Mining Company and our great-grandfather, Thomas Houlette, here.