'Chasing Ghosts' Logging Image Exhibition

"Chasing Ghosts: Loggers Laments and Other Tales from the Dark Woods" sounds like every Washington history fan's dream exhibition and is on exhibit now at the Mason County Historical Society Museum in Shelton.

John Tylczak, photographer and local historian will present large black and white gelatin silver print landscapes. Tylczak grew up in Shelton where four generations of his family have lived since 1885. In his words he describes the exhibit:

"These photos feature long ago abandoned camps and rail lines from the turn of the century logging industry. Each photo is paired with a narrative about the lives of the people who worked in these camps. The “ghosts” are the long dead forests and the people who worked there.

My ancestors arrived in Washington Territory in 1884. They all worked in the logging camps. My grandfather became the superintendent of Phoenix Logging Company and it was the “headquarters camp” of Potlatch on Hood Canal where my mother was raised. I graduated from Shelton High School whose mascot was the Highclimber - a logging camp daredevil whose work required great courage and stamina. Today these logging camps exist only in the photographic collections of our local historical museums.

Hidden among the second-growth forests, streams, and ponds (and in some cases, urban parking lots, lakeside vacation homes, and beneath the waters of hydroelectric dams) however, the places where these hardy pioneers toiled remain. Curious about what these places might look like, in 2016, I started hunting for them. I read newspapers, studied maps and talked to local residents. Eventually, it became apparent that the peripheral accounts were as much a part of this quest as were the actual sites.

Often poignant, frequently tragic, occasionally humorous they include the 1919 story of log jam on the Humptulips River that was forty feet high and contained a nearly unimaginable 75 million feet of logs; a small sawmill in Pacific County in which both the nephew of “Devil

Anse” Hatfield of West Virginia and the cousin of John D. Rockefeller were both employed; and the horrific 1923 tragedy of a logging train being slammed by a landslide of mud and rock just before Christmas killing the engineer, his wife and two-year-old daughter.

My visits have been recorded on large format film and silver gelatin paper. Today these are quiet and soulful places, but there was a time when they were rowdy and full of life, occupied with men working ten-hour days for ten dollars a week– laboring amongst the shrill blasts of locomotive whistles, the crash of falling trees and the whirl of saws.

Accompanied by the sound of a camp house fiddle, the accents from a dozen foreign countries, and a shared thrill of adventure, they bravely stared down the dangerous work and tamed a frontier." ~ John Tylczak

The exhibit will be avaailable through the summer at 427 Ralroad Ave, Shelton. The Museum is open Tuesday through Friday. Admission is free.