Celebrating our
DEEP ROOTS
TIMBER HERITAGE IN MASON COUNTY
Stella Wenstob| historical contributor From Alaska to Northern California, logging towns are an iconic part of the Pacific Northwest. Mill towns, log sorts and boom towns all have their roots in this historical legacy. With Mason County’s Forest Festival fast approaching it is a good time to reflect on Shelton’s distinctive forestry heritage. In 1853, the mighty growth of Douglas Firs, Sitka Spruce and Western Red Cedar attracted the first industry to Mason County as M.T. Simmons, Wesley B. Gisnel and Orrington Cushman built the first water driven mill on what would become known as Mill Creek. This little enterprise was washed away with flood waters in the first year, but in true pioneer spirit it was rebuilt again. Many more water driven mills were built on Hammersley and Oakland Bay. Oakland, Arcadia and Union were busy logging communities by the 1860s. In the mid-1880s, the Satsop Railroad was laid to transport logs out of the forests as the easy to reach shoreline timber was dwindling. The railroad terminus was David Shelton’s claim at the head of Oakland Bay – now known as Shelton. Other logging railroads followed as logging continued to boom. Stewart Holbrock’s Green Commonwealth (1945) recounts the enthusiastic Fourth of July celebrations held in 1887 which included fireworks, a Grand Ball, a shooting match, a greased pole, and possibly the earliest log rolling contest in the state.
Shelton has a continuous history of logger sports of at least one-hundred-and-thirtyfour years! 1887 was also the year that Sol G. Simpson began building and managing the Puget Sound & Grays Harbor Railroad out of Old Kamilche. It was here that Simpson introduced horse teams to transport the felled logs to the railroad lines. Previously on the west coast, oxen teams were used to do the heavy hauling. Simpson also introduced the steam driven donkey engine for yarding to Puget Sound. By the late 1890s, Simpson joined forces with lumberman A. H. Anderson (also known as the Tall Fir of Mason County) in consolidating the railroads and logging interests in Mason County. Shelton's Paul Bunyan In stature and appetite, Anderson has been characterized as a real-life Paul Bunyan. Purportedly, his great height prompted the Shelton Hotel to install an oversize tub and bed for the distinguished guest. Like the Paul Bunyan story of eating exceptionally substantial breakfasts, a fellow logger 33
recalled that for breakfast “Anderson liked a fairly thick beef steak about one foot long, a quart of coffee, and, if he wasn’t really hungry, ten eggs” (Ed Hillier, as quoted in Green Commonwealth 1945:64). Simpson and Anderson were long seeing capitalists. Unlike other companies of Puget Sound who would sell off their logged lands or let them go into tax arrears, Simpson and Anderson held onto their denuded tenures. They understood the importance of land and the possibility of future logging opportunities. Today, Simpson’s descendants, the Reeds own land across California, Oregon, and Washington – making them the fifth-largest private landowners in the U.S. Strangely, it wasn’t until the 1920s that Shelton entered the manufacturing side of forestry. Previously, Shelton’s timber had been shipped out to be milled at other locales, such as McCleary, Seattle, Tacoma, and Ports Blakely, or Gamble. Simpson’s son-in-law, Mark Reed led the Simpson Logging Company in this new manufacturing age after Sol Simpson’s retirement.
