A Logging Camp's Fifteen Minutes of Fame
The local press calls out a national magazine's exaggerated depiction of Shelton's timber industry.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
A recent issue of the Scientific American features an article on 'Aberdeen, a great lumber center,' which includes a photograph of a logging camp. While the writer claims it is near Aberdeen, the faces of the Wyatt and Stubblefield families are clearly recognizable as people who were logging near Shelton just a year ago. The paper notes that the camp in question was actually working a site already logged twice for pile timber, not a pristine forest. The article’s claim that the logs were ten to twenty feet in diameter is described as an 'impossibility,' as such timber would be too large for existing saws to handle.
“It seems somewhat strange to us why the wonders of Washington are not great enough without occasional writers going to the impossibilities in their description.”
This piece highlights the early tension between the romanticized, often exaggerated image of the Pacific Northwest as a frontier of limitless resources and the reality of local industrial labor.
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