Grays Harbor Sends Giants to Chicago
Loggers and mill men scramble to supply massive timber for the Washington State building at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition.
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.
W. L. Davidson, agent for the Washington World's Fair commission, has been collecting material from the Harbor to construct a monumental state building in Chicago. The foundation will feature five tiers of massive Washington logs. Among the contributions are two logs 121 feet long and 42 inches in diameter—the largest ever transported by rail—and a 200-foot flagpole that required sawing in two just to transport it. Local contributors include Alex Poison, Danl Gillies, W. D. Mack, Geo. Davis, and the Cosmopolis mill under C. F. White.
“Two of the logs will be 121 feet long and 42 inches in diameter at the small end, being the largest logs ever transportated by a railroad.”
In the 1890s, timber was the lifeblood of the Grays Harbor economy, and the World's Fair served as a massive branding exercise for the region's raw potential. Today, those same forests are viewed through a lens of conservation and climate mitigation, marking a total shift in how the 'Giant' trees are valued.
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