Category Archives: Forest History & Archives

A train is on its way to the Northwest Montana History Museum in Kalispell.  Arrival time will be announced as the museum assembles crews together to design a new permanent exhibit — a model railroad and locomotive display highlighting the timber industry, namely Somer’s Sawmill, the largest in the valley in the 1900s. The Great Northern Railway came to town to build an 11-mile railroad line to the sawmill. In return, the railroad was supplied with railroad ties. “It was a spur line that went from Somers up to Kalispell,” museum volunteer curator Jane Renfrow said, with timber one of the first major commodities in the valley. “There was a timber famine going on in the rest of the United States.”  …The display will be installed in the “timber room” at the museum, which showcases the history of the logging industry in the Flathead Valley and is the museum’s oldest permanent exhibit. 

Stanwood, Washington — Beginning in the 1870s, just northeast of Stanwood, a settlement that would become known as Cedarhome was the landing place of Scandinavians and other immigrants looking to put down roots. A couple of decades earlier, the first Euro-Americans had begun arriving on Camano Island and the banks of the Stillaguamish River attracted by the economic opportunity of a burgeoning timber industry and the vast agricultural potential of the land. …The 1848 California Gold Rush created a demand for lumber to build flumes, causing the timber industry to boom in the Puget Sound region, including the Stillaguamish Valley and Camano Island. The surrounding forests were opened to logging and development in part by the 1855 Treaty of Point Elliott, which resulted in many embattled Indigenous people ceding their land and moving to reservations. Around the time of the treaty, a logging camp was established at Utsalady Bay on the north end of Camano Island.

The National Conservation Legacy Center will be a world class museum… Our exhibits will feature state of the art participatory and immersion experiences with educational activities and events to inspire our visitors to engage and understand the conservation of America’s natural resources. …Since 1905, the U.S. Forest Service has been making history as America’s first conservation agency. However, over the course of its 100+ year history, there has never been one central location where the people can learn and enjoy this history. …The National Conservation Legacy Center will provide a world class, one of a kind facility for all to learn and enjoy this rich and uniquely American conservation history. …Tall timbers tell stories in the Grand Lobby with wood timbers featured from across the nation. The lobby’s construction will use 16 different wood species for support posts. Visitors will learn how these different tree species played a role in the development of the United States.

TILLAMOOK FOREST CENTER, Oregon — Remember the Columbia River Gorge on fire, burning almost 50,000 acres of wilderness? That fire was just one-seventh the size of the Tillamook Burn, four blazes sparked by logging equipment between 1933 and 1951 that consumed much of the old-growth forest in the Coast Range. The fire rages again every 30 minutes in the Tillamook Burn Theater, where the Oregon Department of Forestry presents a multisensory documentary on the inferno. As the sound of fire crackles and the cinema’s walls turn red, the room fills with the smell of burning trees (but only faintly; the theater’s machines have run out of artificial smoke scent 18 years after opening). The movie is the centerpiece of the Tillamook Forest Center, a gorgeous facility on the Wilson River, halfway between Portland and the coast, focused on how the timber industry burned down the forest and planted a new one. 

Friedrich Weyerhäuser

Washington’s forests changed during the nineteenth century. When the century began, forests dominated most of the region. They were homelands for diverse and sovereign Indigenous nations whose reciprocal relationships with these places made them thick with stories, family relationships, and material culture. European and American nations claimed these forests too. By the mid century, Americans arrived in greater numbers building towns, and developing resources, attracted in part by the abundant timber. In 1854-1855, territorial governor and superintendent of Indian affairs Isaac Stevens signed treaties with tribes and bands across the territory that extinguished Native title to millions of acres, allowing forests to be transformed from Native ancestral homes to non-Native-owned property. …Congress supported railroads with land grants, including forest lands, and by the late nineteenth century timber companies were buying large tracts of forests. In 1900, Weyerhaeuser bought 900,000 acres of timberland from the Northern Pacific, marking the end of one era and the beginning of another

On May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens erupted and drastically changed the surrounding environment. Despite the devastation to plant, animal, and human communities, ecological recovery developed over time. Scientists saw the landscape as an ideal place to study ecological processes, while the timber industry wanted to hasten the forest’s rebound. Weyerhaeuser Company and the Forest Service planted trees, but on the new 110,000-acre Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument, nature was allowed to replant at its own pace with scientists closely observing the results. The tensions among managers about how much intervention was permissible and warranted has been constant since the eruption. Through the years, recreationists have sometimes clamored for more access to the region. In the decades after the eruption, scientists have argued for and closely monitored how ecological systems have reconstituted themselves with minimal human intervention. The 1980 eruption provided a large-scale experiment that has taught scientists and land managers much about ecological disturbance and ecosystem management.

OREGON — A presentation titled “Unearthing Forgotten Forestry Narratives” with a focus on historic work done in Oregon by foresters will be held at the Tillamook Forest Center Saturday, April 27 at 1 p.m. The presentation, a joint effort by Maxville Heritage Interpretive Center and the Vernonia Pioneer Museum, is sponsored by the State Forests Trust—formerly the Tillamook Forest Heritage Trust—and is free to attend. “Join the Tillamook Forest Center as we invite Maxville Heritage Interpretive Center and the Vernonia Pioneer Museum, to share their records and contributions their communities have made in Oregon forestry,” the forestry center said on social media. A Facebook event with more information has been created. Following the presentation, audience members will be invited to share their own forestry stories. “Share your heritage, personal accounts, physical artifacts, or simply join us to hear rarely told stories,” the center said.

On the morning of March 14, there were two large wood products businesses operating in Missoula County, the last remaining vestiges of a timber processing industry that powered the region’s economy for a century and a half. Within the span of six days, both Pyramid Mountain Lumber in Seeley Lake and Roseburg Forest Products’ Missoula particleboard plant had announced they were shutting down permanently. The closures mark the final knockout punch locally to an industry that helped build Missoula and put food on tables here for over 150 years. The settlement of the Hellgate Trading Post was renamed Missoula Mills in 1866 due to the importance of logging and the mills in what is now Bonner and Milltown. …Missoula has a long history of absorbing the shock of huge industrial wood products businesses shutting down due to unfavorable economics. The timber of western Montana helped build the town and fuel its economy…

The origins of the Gifford Pinchot National Forest are firmly rooted in the national conservation movement that swept this country at the beginning of the 20th century. Working together, Gifford Pinchot, Chief of the Forest Service, and President Theodore Roosevelt set aside millions of acres of new national forest lands. In 1907 President Roosevelt established the vast Rainier National Forest along the Cascade Range in Washington. To better administer these lands, the southern portion of the Rainier became a Columbia National Forest in 1908. …Despite proximity to the urban centers of Portland and Vancouver, public use of the Columbia National Forest in 1908 was very limited. Indian peoples continued the traditional use of their summer camps in the extensive berryfields. Prospectors worked their mining claims in the Spirit Lake region with little success. Sheepherders from Klickitat County brought thousands of sheep for summer forage. Loggers from the Midwest, living in camps along the Wind River, cut timber that would be milled into lumber for houses back east.

Hobart Mills Sawmill

Truckee, California, has a rich history shaped by the lumber industry. The town was originally established as a vital hub for the Central Pacific Railroad. Additionally, in the 19th century Truckee played a pivotal role in the development of the American West. Truckee’s lumber was a cornerstone of its economic growth leaving an indelible mark on the town’s landscape and identity. The lumber industry traces its roots back to the mid-1800s when pioneers recognized the abundance of Sugar Pine and other pine in the surrounding forests. The demand for lumber skyrocketed with the construction of the First Transcontinental Railroad and Truckee became a strategic location for the supply of wood to fuel the locomotives and build the tracks. Large sawmills were established, transforming Truckee into a bustling center for logging and milling.

SAN FRANCISCO — When it came time to restore a late-19th century schooner at San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park, the National Park Service placed a call to the U.S. Forest Service. The ship is the C.A. Thayer, a vessel that first launched in 1895… was used to carry lumber from the Puget Sound into San Francisco and Los Angeles, and Australia. The wooden-hulled, three-mast schooner is routinely restored as part of preventive maintenance, but finding the right size and dimensions for lumber can prove challenging and costly. …Through a Federal Free to Use request the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest was able to donate the trees for the ship’s restoration. …The Cedar and Douglas Fir were felled after it was concluded that the trees were a hazard in the campground due to root rot. Their time on the forest might have been coming to an end, but a second life was waiting.