WILLOW CREEK — Ezra Thorne II, the fourth-generation Thorne who worked as a millwright at the Willow Creek Hardwood Flooring Company for 32 years and whose family name is inseparable from the town’s history, died Tuesday at his home on River Road. He was 74.
The cause of death was heart failure, according to Dr. Henry Albright, who attended him in his final hours. Thorne had been in declining health for the past year but had remained active, walking daily to Thorne’s Bend — the bend in the Willow River where his great-grandfather Ezra Thorne first built a shipyard in 1803.
Ezra Thorne II was born in 1868 in the same River Road house in which he died — the oldest continuously occupied dwelling in Willow Creek. He was the grandson of Nathaniel Thorne, who built the house in the 1820s, and the son of William Thorne, the last shipbuilder, who closed Thorne & Sons Shipworks in 1882 when the railroad made river shipping obsolete.
When the shipyard closed, Thorne was 14 years old. He spent the next decade working as a farmhand and lumberman before joining the mill crew when the flooring mill opened in 1903. He worked as a millwright — a skilled mechanic who maintained and repaired the mill’s machinery — until his retirement in 1935.
“Ezra Thorne was a living connection between two eras,” Arthur Whitcomb writes in the Gazette’s obituary, which runs nearly two full columns. “He was born when Willow Creek was a shipbuilding town and died when it was a mill town. He saw the river change from a highway for vessels to a channel for logs. He saw the family business — the business his grandfather built — close and another rise in its place. He carried within him the memory of a Willow Creek that no longer exists.”
Thorne is survived by his son, Walter Thorne, 43, who is currently employed as a rural mail carrier; Walter’s wife, Eleanor; and their infant son, Jedidiah, born in 1942. The baby — a seventh-generation Willow Creek Thorne — is the family’s hope for the future.
The funeral will be held Saturday at the Congregational Church, with burial in the town cemetery beside his father and grandfather. The mill will be closed for the morning in his honor.