AKRON, Ind. — Pike Lumber Co., the honored business at this year’s Fulton County Historical Power Show, is one of the largest and most modern hardwood lumber manufacturers in Indiana.

The Akron-based company, which also operates sawmills in Carbon and Milan, had humble beginnings. Although it takes its name from the late D.A. Pike, who established a sawmill in nearby Wabash in 1904, the company’s genesis rests firmly on the shoulders of Pike’s second daughter, Helen, and Howard Utter, the man who later became her husband.

“They were the entrepreneurial generation of this company,” said their son, Channing.

He cherishes stories that appeared in newspapers throughout Indiana in the mid-1930s about Helen Pike, “the woman in the woods.”

It was she, sensing D.A. Pike’s disappointment at the lack of a son to continue in the lumber industry, who asked for a portable sawmill and then went into the forests of northern Indiana and southern Michigan with a crew of woodsmen. She called her operation D.A. Pike Lumber Co. out of appreciation for her father’s help in obtaining a Rumley steam engine and a $300 portable sawmill.

Her father eventually sent Howard Utter, a lumberjack working as Pike’s plant superintendent, to “look after my little girl.” The couple married a year later but continued moving from camp to camp until 1937, when they moved into a no-longer-used sawmill in Akron and put down roots.

They did not, however, merge with D.A. Pike’s Akron Sawmill. Utter told his father-in-law, “D.A. you’ve got to be the big fish in your little pond and I need to be the big fish in my own pond.”

Nevertheless, he adamantly refused to rename the company Utter Lumber Co. “The Pike name has been associated with quality lumber since 1853,” he said in tribute to the generations of Pikes who preceded Helen into the woods. “Pike’s reputation is worth more to me than having my name on the smokestack.”

In 1949, the company’s name officially changed to Pike Lumber Co.

In the 1960s a new generation of college-trained foresters and managers was brought in to prepare for the future. They continued a reforestation program begun in the 1950s, instituted best management practices in their harvests and in the 1970s built the company’s second mill at Carbon in Clay County. When that mill burned, it was rebuilt in 1991.

This growth period lasted until Utter died in 1995. After his death, the company entered the age of technology by replacing the Akron mill with a new sawmill using the latest in computerized technology, something Utter had resisted. State-of-the-art equipment replaced many of the labor-intensive operations in the old mill that took its shape from the Winona and Erie rail lines that formerly merged there.

With the advent of increased technology came more accurate cutting, milling and lumber handling operations and a continued emphasis on trained workers.

The company’s third sawmill, a 25,000 square-foot facility set on 35 acres in a developing Milan forestry business park, enlarged Pike’s presence in an area where the company had maintained a satellite office in nearby Batesville for the previous 18 years.

Like the mills in Akron and Carbon, the Milan plant was built “green,” in that every part of the lumber creation process is used. Residue is sold as sawdust, wood chips and mulch. Water used to keep logs moist in warmer months is reclaimed and stored in an on-site pond.

Helen Pike Utter, “the woman in the woods,” died in 2000, having lived to see the company she founded move into the age of technology.

Dean Baker, the company’s first trained forester, succeeded Howard Utter as president; he was succeeded by Jim Mulligan. Both continue as directors. John Brown is the current president and Jim Steen is executive vice president.

Of the Utters’ three children, Channing has been most actively involved in the company’s growth and development, having worked in every area of its operation and in the expansion and development of its second and third stages. He continues as a director, as do his sister, Lynne Northrop, and her husband, Joe. Their sister, Kay, who opted for a teaching career, is deceased.