Marking the
V E RY QUIET
2020
Mason County Forest Festival The plans were made... the court was selected. The carnival booked & sponsors were signing up. Then the whole country shut down. The Forest Festival committee attempted to hang on by rescheduling the event to August from May. But even that quickly became an uncertainty. With the cancellation of the 76th annual event that means so much to the local community – we wanted to take the time to mark it with a few pages. Thank you to all the volunteers. To help combat the destructive wildfires in the region — while also promoting the importance of forests to the local economy — Mason County hosted their first forest festival in the spring of 1945. The initial festival featured a parade, a beauty pageant (now the royalty court), a Paul Bunyan impersonator, and various other events and activities. The idea proved even more successful than imagined.
It is no surprise that the local community was pretty excited about the event, and still support it today with Mason County's heritage being long tied to the timber industry.
claim on a nearby inlet off Puget Sound. Sol G. Simpson came to the area and founded the Simpson Logging Company in the 1890s. The Simpson Company would eventually grow and expand throughout the country, but Shelton served as an important center of operations for much of the following century.
In 1853, Michael T. Simmons built the first sawmill in Mason County on Mill Creek just south of present-day Shelton. Around this same time, David Shelton staked a settlement
photo: © Cooper Studios FJORD
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Festival background information developed from an Internet article by Eben Lehman, Forest History Society, Durham, NC
the thrilling parade and the exciting contests in which loggers demonstrate their skills at falling, bucking, tree topping and truck driving."
The first Mason County Forest Festival honored the industry by showcasing the value of timber and the importance of preventing forest fires.
The idea of a forest festival quickly spread across the country along with the Keep Green program. “You have in Shelton, in my opinion, the best all-around forest festival in the United States,” read a quote from a mid-1950s article. “It has been the inspiration of many forest communities throughout the U.S."
The event continued to gain popularity each year. People from all over Washington traveled to Shelton to see, and in the words of an ad for the 12th Annual Forest Festival, “the dramatic Forest Pageant,
2020 would mark the 76th Annual Mason County Forest Festival. However, with the uncertainty and mandates imposed by COVID-19, organizers made the difficult decision to cancel this year.
