الثلاثاء، 9 أكتوبر 2012

The Ghost


Exploration and Discovery in the Land of Myst

Today we feature the first installment in our series "Exploring Abandoned Places of the Pacific Northwest". This area is not only naturally spectacular and culturally intense, it's also rich in mining and logging history, with many long-abandoned towns and camps littering the coast line.

Avi Abrams (of Dark Roasted Blend) and a historian Steve O'Neill from Olympia, Washington, team up to bring us a true gem of a ghost town. Steve writes: "There are places in the Pacific Northwest that are breathtaking. I'm an historian. Taught history for about twenty years. The Pacific Northwest is not as deeply rooted historically as other parts of the world, but there is a colorful, multilayered, interwoven fabric to this place that I've come to love."


(photography by Avi Abrams, Dark Roasted Blend)


The Story of Bordeaux, Washington: Loads of Pioneer Spirit, Multiplied by Hard Work, Sheer Guts, Greed and Industry

For sixty years the logging town of Bordeaux, Washington prospered because it was located in the heart of Capital Forest where towering fir and cedar trees provided beams for buildings, spars for sailing ships and shingles for roofs. The 120 ft. straight, clear spars went to Maine to provide the masts for the fast clipper ships. Mumby cedar shingles were prized in the Midwest as the best quality for homes and businesses. After 100 years or more, the warehouses of Seattle and Tacoma are now offices and upscale restaurants with the original, massive, open beams milled from forest giants that once were common, but now are protected.


(Mumby Shingle Mill, 1904. The pond is where the train would dump the Cedar logs so they could be floated to the mill)

Logging towns were very similar to other historical examples of booming economies such as cattle towns filled with drunk cowboys or gold rush towns with newly rich miners trying hard to spend as much as they could, as fast as they could.

The town of Bordeaux as seen from above the saw mill, in 1918 at the time of the first World War. The mist escaping the building in the foreground was steam from a kiln that dried the timber:



Bordeaux, 1932. Notice the protection over the stack of the yarder. Fire was a constant danger so sparks were controlled:



(Taken in 1916, the Northern Pacific boxcar stands in front of the company store. Today there is a paved road over what was once the rail bed)

Logging camps were known as places filled with the hardest working of young men bursting with energy and pent up testosterone. Everyday danger was accepted as an occupational hazard and fear was common but laughed at in a show of bravado:


(Loggers in front of the bunk house in 1919 - image via University of Washington Digital Archives)

It was very common for a steel cable to break under the pressure of yarding a log onto the landing... And when a steel cable broke under that much pressure, it was whispering death in any direction it flew.


(Train crossing a trestle in 1932)

Logging crews in 1932. Notice how casually loggers are perched on precariously piled logs. It takes very little for the whole pile to shift and crush anyone sitting or standing in the wrong place:



The steel-plated boilers of the steam donkeys were known to occasionally explode, killing anyone nearby.


(Steam donkey 1932 with fire guard)

Massive logs on a line of trucks from 1938 display how many “board feet” are in each log. The second truck shows 8770 board feet in that log. In today's prices for clear fir, the finished lumber in just that log would be worth about $71,000:



This massive giant was cut in 1938 on Fuzzy Top, one of the peaks in Capital Forest:


(Log being loaded onto a truck - image via University of Washington Digital Collection, INDO257)

“Widow Makers” were trees with huge, heavy limbs over a hundred feet in the air that were known to break and fall when the tree was being felled.


The Origin of "Skid Row", Serbian Loggers Near-Revolution, and other interesting things

The technology of logging and the machinery of the sawmills paralleled other developments during the Industrial Revolution at the turn of the century. In the early days of Bordeaux, oxen or horses hauled logs on a “skid road” of greased, small logs to the river, pond or railroad. The ends of the log were rounded off to allow travel over the skid road. Seattle's skid road, or skid row, became synonymous with houses of ill repute that lined the road to the Yesler saw mill.


(Logging Crew. The horses and skid roads can be seen in the background leading to the railroad - image via University of Washington Digital Collection, INDO329)

Mess hall in Bordeaux, 1919. Hungry loggers need fuel:


(image via University of Washington Digital Archives, CKK0007)

As with other industrial towns at the turn of the century, labor movements became organized to fight for safer working conditions, higher pay and reasonable hours. It was not unusual for companies to hire armed enforcers to break up labor efforts often leading to armed conflict. In the logging camps of Bordeaux, it was Serbian loggers who organized unions to demand concessions.

It's ironic that a report by a government spy dated 1919, described the efforts of Serbian loggers to organize labor. Serbian loggers? In the European Balkans of 1914, it was Serbian activists seeking independence from the Austrian Empire who assassinated the Archduke of Austria leading to a chain of events that unleashed the carnage of World War I.

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