The Long Road to Forest Exchange
After twenty-five years of federal red tape, a presidential proclamation finally grants Washington control over 152,000 acres of timberland.
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.
President Calvin Coolidge’s proclamation recently releasing 152,804 acres of timber lands in the Olympic and Snoqualmie forest reserves for selection by this state completes the work of exchanging 438,250 acres of federal for lost state lands. This gives Washington full control of its land grant for school, capitol, penal, and charitable institutional work. The deal could have been completed in 1917, but the war sent engineers to the front instead of to the Washington forests. The state actually gained an advantage by the delay: the 1921 Olympic storm destroyed timber on federal land, sparing the state the loss of its prospective acres.
“The deal between state and government could have been completed in 1917, but for the fact that war came and engineers... were sent to the front.”
This bureaucratic saga mirrors ongoing tensions between state management and federal forest land in the Pacific Northwest. It serves as a reminder that land policy and institutional funding (like for schools) have been tied to forestry for over a century.
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