Mono Mills grew out of Bodie’s urgent need for wood after rich gold and silver strikes in 1877 swelled the mining town’s population to more than 10,000 by 1879. Although Bodie was rich in ore, it lacked nearby timber and required great quantities of wood for building, steam power, cooking, heating, mine supports, and milling. To solve persistent shortages and high prices, a group from Bodie took possession of 12,000 acres of timber south of Mono Lake and in 1881 formed the Bodie Railway and Lumber Company in a vast Jeffery pine forest. Woodsmen cut the trees with cross-cut saws and moved logs through soft pumice sands with teams of oxen, mules, solid-wheeled trucks, and Michigan Wheels, while railroad spurs and line cabins extended logging into more remote forest areas. At its height, about 200 men worked in the woods, and the operation supplied enormous amounts of fuel wood and lumber to Bodie, including 5,000,000 board feet of lumber and 27,000 cords of wood in 1882. The sawmill below Mono Mills, staffed by 25 men and equipped with at least four saws, could cut 80,000 board feet per day, using waste wood to generate the steam needed to run the mill and loading finished planks onto rail carts and flatcars for drying and shipment to Bodie. A 32-mile narrow-gauge railway, completed in 1881, linked the timberlands with Bodie and carried lumber on at least 32 flatcars behind four steam engines named Tybo, Mono, Inyo, and Bodie; although isolated from outside rail lines and not intended for passengers, it was occasionally used by riders at their own risk. Mono Mills became a lumber community with boarding houses, small homes, millworkers, railroad workers, loggers, mule teamsters, cooks, and laundry workers, and Chinese, Kutzakida Indians, and white settlers all supported the operation. As mining output at Bodie declined in the late 1880s, Mono Mills stopped cutting and milling in 1890, resumed after a brief revival, then shrank after electricity from the Green Creek hydroelectric plant reached Bodie in 1892 and reduced the town’s need for wood. Mono Mills closed permanently in 1917, and its rails and equipment were sold for scrap in 1918.