Wooden Bikinis??

We spent a bit of time exploring around Hoquiam and Aberdeen. Both little towns sit as far inland as they can on Grays Harbor – a very large bay on the North West coast of Washington. The area made its fortune with logging… huge numbers of huge logs were floated down rivers to the bay, and loaded on ships bound for ports all over the world.

Here’s one factory that is still involved with logging… of a sort. Truckload after truckload of logs enter this area, only to be ground to a pulp! Gigantic piles of wood pulp are placed into conveyer system, sent over the road, onto docks, and onto large barges, and then shipped off to who-knows-where.

The Polson family was one of those who made a fortune with the logging operations. This home, now a museum, was given to Arnold Polson by his loving uncle Robert, as a wedding gift in 1924. It is 6,500 square foot mansion, dwarfed only for a time by Arnold’s Father Alex’s larger mansion right next door. It has twenty-six rooms, six bathrooms, and four fireplaces. Unfortunately Alex’s place has been destroyed, but this museum remains with a lot of interesting artifacts of life in the area in the 1920’s.

Below are two impressive tall gadgets. The steam engine on a sledge was called a “Donkey.” It ran a huge winch, and a cable was attached to a big tree, the cable winched in, and the donkey would move towards the tree. Using this method, they’d position it in an area where they were cutting the trees, and then use pulleys and a tall “topped” tree, use it as a crane to move logs downslope to the river. The Grandfather Clock is also surprisingly huge – over 12 feet tall. It was brought to Hoquiam in 1908 from New York, traveling around Cape Horn. It was used in Hoquiam’s first water company’s main office. In 1938 the building became a jewelry store, and the clock ticked on there. In 1986 it was restored and donated to this Polson museum. The case is solid walnut with burl insets. The clock is very accurate even now. One unique design factor is the use of mercury-filled tubes as pendulum weight. The theory is that changes in temperature or humidity won’t unevenly expand or contract the pendulum and disrupt its center of gravity. Interesting!

A model of logging ships of the time.

A really savage looking milk can opener!

“Why Wear Woolen Wraps When Wood Would Wear Wonderfully – Without Warping?” The was the Washingtonian’s headline for the 1929 Wood Week exhibition. They had several “Spruce Girls” wearing wooden outfits, making headlines, and putting Grays Harbor and its wood-based industries in the national spotlight.

The veneers were most commonly used for making plywood, fruit and berry boxes, and. as advertised, “containers for every purpose.” The Spruce Girls posed with new wooden creations for several years.

This picture below looks quite ominous… like an ancient machine gun. Close. In 1935 the widespread labor strikes convinced the Sheriff’s office that they needed better crowd control. This thing is a tear gas gun! Each of the 18 chambers could fire a one inch cartridge of tear gas. It is not documented whether the department ever used this thing in a crowd control situation.

This is a guest room, and shows off an interesting feature. All the flooring was created with no butt joints. At the widest parts of the home, the boards run a full 40 feet. And knots are not to be found! What would you expect from a lumber baron?

Mrs. Polson was a singer of some repute, and kept lots of sheet music in this interesting cabinet. More drawers than I care to count!

The barn out back has some lumber mill artifacts, including this mammoth band saw. It is shown with a very large log mid-cut. The hand-on-the-band is to show the size of this great machine.

A couple of vehicles also share the barn…

This impressive vehicle is NOT in the museum’s barn, and is only included here because I thought it is beautiful.

Along the edge of the bay, hundreds of pilings give evidence of a once far busier shipping business.

Our campground is along a riverbank that also supplied logs for the local industry.

You can see train tracks that lead to now-abandoned or non-existing wharfs. The tracks have not been used for a while!

Here’s another interesting vehicle. This big tractor truck pulled in with the jeep on the flat bed of the truck, with the 5th wheel trailer hooked on behind that! Quite a big fancy rig.

Our next destination was La Push, Washington. On the coast, about as far west and north as you can get in the lower 48. On the way, we had several miles of freshly graveled roads. A truck zoomed past us, going the other way, and a stone hit us very hard. The sound was dramatic, but our windshield didn’t seem to have sustained any (further) damage. Only when we arrived at our campsite did we notice the side window had been shattered! Just the one pane. It doesn’t show in the photo well, but the whole pane is crazed in an amazingly uniform pattern.

When I’d called for reservations at this seaside RV park, I was told they were full so they’d put me in the “River View” park a few miles away. That sounded fine… but the river was an uncomfortable walk on a very narrow road.