Category Archives: Forest History & Archives

KALISPELL, Montana — There’s a new exhibit at the Northwest Montana History Museum in Kalispell that focuses on the importance of the timber industry to the region. The exhibit called “Lumberjacks, Tie Hacks and River Pigs” took months to construct and displays historic tools, clothing and even a model train layout featuring the Somers tie plant and other past and present Flathead Valley landmarks. Museum Executive Director Margaret Davis said … “Timber is the reason why many people came to this area and it’s also the reason why the trains were able to stretch across America because we were producing ties from our immense forests to make those trains run the distance, so it wasn’t just an industry important for northwest Montana, it was an industry important to the whole country,” said Davis.

This video from the 1970s showcases the change in logging from the 1930s to the then present day as automation changes the industry. It is really interesting to see how things have changed in terms of the daily life of a logger as well as the impact of the forest products industry on the region. Anyone who loves logging will find this trip down memory lane revealing. 

Since the early 1850s, Flagstaff’s prosperous, diverse arboreal features have fed into the creation and growth of a thriving logging industry, with intricate threads tying it to communities across the general Flagstaff area. Northern Arizona University’s School of Forestry, created to address the rising demand for ecologists knowledgeable about timber management 100 years later, remains a critical piece of that story.  The Cline Library Special Collections and Archives (SCA) chose to encapsulate more than a century of this history in its exhibit “Timber! Northern Arizona’s Logging Legacy,” which uses authentic photographs, documents and diary entries from throughout the 19th and 20th centuries to outline northern Arizona’s evolving relationship with its forests. The exhibition will be on display in Cline Library’s SCA gallery until August 2025.  

OREGON — Over 100 years ago, a Missouri-based lumber company built what became known as Maxville, a segregated logging town in northeastern Oregon. Archaeologists have just discovered artifacts from the town’s lost Black neighborhood. Archaeologist Sophia Tribelhorn holds in her hand pieces of charred animal bones, decorated glass and a Levi Strauss workwear rivet… the rediscovery of Black history at Maxville: a former timber company town near Wallowa in northeastern Oregon. …The Missouri-based Bowman-Hicks Lumber Company set up the town in 1923, bringing in skilled loggers from the American South. About 40 to 60 Black people would eventually come to live and work in Maxville as part of a total population of approximately 400 people. Those lives, however, were segregated along typical early-20th-century color lines. …After the Bowman-Hicks Lumber Company closed Maxville in 1933, a severe winter storm in 1946 caused most of the remaining town structures to collapse. The exact location of where the Black families lived was lost.

CALIFORNIA —On June 21, 1935, at the Holmes-Eureka lumber mill in Eureka, a six-week-old strike by Humboldt County lumber workers came to a violent end. A riot broke out when a crowd of more than 200 pickets clashed with police and vigilantes attempting to clear the front gate. Tear gas, then firearms were used against stone-throwing strikers, killing three and wounding at least seven. More than 100 people were arrested… The Holmes-Eureka Massacre, as it later became known, is a forgotten chapter in the Great Northwest Lumber Strike of 1935. The strike was a failure for unions throughout the Northwest and a social disaster for the little town of Eureka. The strike and the riot that ended it were marked with violence and conspiracy that were brought to light by the trials of those arrested. …surviving court records, newspaper archives, and eyewitness reports yield an interesting story of labor’s struggle for acceptance in Humboldt County.

BOISE, Idaho — The Boise National Forest fire lookouts have played a pivotal role in the history of fighting wildfire. The story begins in 1908 when the Boise National Forest service started. A forest supervisor was walking towards a wildfire when he ran into Harry Shellworth who was working for the Boise Payette Lumber Company. “At that time they both saw the need to defend our wild areas from fire. They set up a gentlemen’s agreement and it spurred on the Southern Idaho Timber Protective Association,” said Virginia Clifton, a historian with the Boise National Forest. This partnership would build the first fire lookout in the area in 1908 on top of Bald Mountain, today called the Thorn Creek Lookout. Harry Shellworth took advantage of the Civilian Conservation Corps established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 to advocate for funding in Idaho.

MENDOCINO County, California — The Jackson Demonstration State Forest was controversial from the day it was purchased in 1947 from the old Caspar Lumber Company. The government taking over private property can create suspicion, especially in those red scare days. At the time, big lumber corporations from the Deep South and Pacific Northwest were clearcutting newly purchased lands in California. The old-growth timber resource of Mendocino County was almost entirely harvested. Replantings were either not done or were done in a non-scientific way, threatening the ecological and economic forest and causing alarm in universities, science and government. Caspar Lumber remained one of the few large operators that was locally owned, with a famous annual family picnic. It was relatively responsible, practicing some selective logging in an age of bulldozer clearcutting. Then came the creation of California’s demonstration forest system with four big land purchases by the state in the late 1940s. 

Alex Robertson

Seventy-five years ago today, the Mann Gulch Fire claimed the lives of 13 people. It is my distinct honor to travel to Montana today to join the Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest, members of the smokejumper community and families of the fallen to reflect on the 1949 Mann Gulch event. We are not just commemorating a historical incident. We are honoring the lives of the 13 firefighters whose sacrifice continues to shape the wildland fire community. Ten of the firefighters were World War II veterans, each with their own stories and dreams. One was celebrating his 19th birthday when he got the call to respond to the fire. Another was a college student working for the summer as a recreation and fire prevention technician. Much like our workforce today, the 13 firefighters were young, had a passion for service, and came from all over the country to work for the Forest Service.

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.