The first log had been cut in the new mill on January 27, 1930, but the company struggled during the Great Depression and growth was slow. With the outbreak of World War II, the mill began supplying lumber products for the war effort. After the war, the company focused on the home market and modernized the plant in the early 1950s.
On January 31, 1963, the Burns Times Herald reported: “1962 Sees Hines Breaking Record.” The mill had shipped 134,250,000 board feet of lumber from the Hines plant, and payroll had reached an all-time high. In the late 1960s, however, union strikes interrupted work at the mills with three strikes in two years. In the 1970s, the company again modernized the operation, but problems developed in the late 1970s with rising timber prices, high wages, and a deteriorating lumber market.
In 1980, the population of Hines was 1,692. That year the Hines Lumber Company began laying off workers after the loss of a bid for federal timber to a sawmill in Prineville. In February, the mill began closing its four divisions, and the stud mill and plywood and veneer plants closed before the end of the year.
By February 1981, Harney County unemployment was over 30 percent, and in June the mill equipment was auctioned off. The sawmill was remodeled and vastly reduced in size, reopened in November with about 400 workers. In 1983, the Edward Hines Lumber Company sold the last of its Oregon holdings to Snow Mountain Pine Company, thus ending an era that spanned over fifty years.