Celebrating our Deep roots

Timber Heritage In Mason County

In 1853, the mighty stands of firs, spruce and 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.

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.

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. Like the Paul Bunyan story of eating exceptionally substantial breakfasts, a fellow logger 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.

In 1924, the Simpson’s Logging Company began construction of a power plant and the Reed Mill Company in Shelton. The Reed Mill focused on milling Western Hemlock and supplying material for the fledgling Rainier Pulp & Paper Company (founded in 1926).

Although logging was primarily about “getting the wood,” pulp and paper products emerged as important industries to Mason County. Further advances in research in 1931 by the scientist of Rainier and DuPont discovered methods of taking the cellulose from Western Hemlocks and converting it into a fiber which could be formed into a wood-based plastic known as cellophane and could be spun into the revolutionary new fabric Rayon.

Keep Washington Green

Throughout the Pacific Northwest, this timber history has been dogged by the flickering presence of forest fires. The fires of 1847 and 1902 were devastating years. The 1902 fires destroyed logging camps, sawmills, railcars, and many homes in Mason County.