The Daily News from Port Angeles, Washington • Page 17

THE DAILY NEWT- 15 Port Angeles, Dec. 12, 1976 Special weekly bicentennial page of The Daily News Chapter 50: Payrolls built out of wood Statisticians tell us that 98 per cent of the Peninsula's exports are wood or wood products. Prom the days when freebooting skippers prowled the shores for Douglas fir spars to Represent when shipload after shipload oflnproceS logs go to Japan, the whole tree has been the Peninsula's wealth That it is an exhaustible been acknowledged Now far-seeing lumber companies rl orest as hey cut, and there is more effort made to preserve the trees that have taken nearly a millennium to grow. evitablv th great virgin stands of accessible Umber disappeared, and it became necessary to use smaller trees or trees which, like the hemlock, had not been considered commercially valuable. With this use of secondary forest products, the Port Townsend area acquired for the first time an industry and a payroll.

There had been numerous attempts to establish industries, ranging from the drydock that was towed to Vashon Island when completed to the steel mill that started up three times and three times ground to a halt. In between these ventures was a nail factory, a brickworks, and a fish cannery. But nothing lasted. It might have been memories of past defeats that, in 1927, made some of Port Townsend's old timers protest the proposal of the National Paper Products Co. to build a mill at Glen Cove on what had been the old Briggs farm.

After all, ttie railroad had started there, and everyone knew what a disaster that had been. Other townspeople were more optimistic, or more farsighted, and fought to bring in the mill. Actual construction of the buildings, and the creation of an adequate water system, brought Port Townsend its first real payroll in a generation. A year later the mill started operating, and provided employment for several hundred men and women. Now a part of the Crown Zellerbach Corporation, it has a work force that seldom falls below 500 and provides an annual payroll of million Paper and paper products go from Glen Cove to every part of the world.

Unlike Port Townsend, Port Angeles had a history of successful sawmilling before turning to the byproducts of wood. 1 as caUed il for reas was the one built by Michael Earles. There had been numerous small ones before that, chief among them the Colony Mill and the Filion Brothers' Mill, as well as several small but successful shingle mills. But it was Earles' mill, later sold to Charles Nelson, that furnished Port Angeles with its first big payroll It ran until just before World War II, and by that time there were other mills whose output was based on wood products The Fibreboard Co. (which has since closed down) was making cartons and containers, and the Washington Pulp and Paper Co.

(later a Crown Zellerbach property) was producing newsprint. Peninsula Plywood had started as a cooperative venture in 1941, processing Douglas fir and later cedar into plywood panels. Greatly expanded, with timber holdings in both Jefferson and Clallam counties as well as Canada, it continues a healthy operation as a division of ITT Rayonier. From 1919 until 1930 the large government-built spruce mill at Enms Creek, where the Puget Sound Cooperative Colony had sawed their own lumber and built their own steamer the Angeles, had stood deserted. It was a monument to if nothing else man's inability to control events.

By 1930 thanks to electric power generated on the Elwha River (a project started by Thomas AldWell) and later transmitted from Bpnneville, electrically operated mills had become economically feasible. Even though it meant dismantling the plant itself, which had been designed for steam power, the Olympic Forests Product Co. purchased the site and built a sulphite mill on the brick foundation of the old spruce mill Known for a time as Rayonier it is now ITT Rayonier Michael Rarles and Charles Nelson, whose gangsaws sliced prime logs into planks and 2x4s, and burned by the ton what was left over, would have sneered at what the pulp mills use. But they can go on for years using second growth timber and reforesting as they go. It makes for a sounder if less lavish economy.

There were always, of course, a few industries unrelated to timber. An early one was a clam and fish cannery started in Port Angeles' gaudy '90s by Mary Easter, the same free spirit who drove her partner out of town by taking pot shots at him. Apparently she lost interest in the canning business after that, for the cannery was sold to a Columbia River company. By 1905 it was modernized and enlarged by still a new owner, the Manhattan Packing Co. But the inevitable lean years of fishing, and the outlawing of fish traps, put the company out of business.

Another undertaking, and one that was highly successful for a number of years, was a brewery built after the turn of the century by members of a rather clannish group of Germans who had come to Port Angeles at the time of the Land Jump. Frederick Jensen and a Mr. Hirsch were chief promoters, but they were surrounded by such good German names as Adolph Oettinger, Nicholas Heuslein and Louis Gehrke. Their brewery could turn out 6,000 barrels of beer a year. Since this would have figured out to some pretty heavy drinking among a population of 3,000 that included men, women, infants and members of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, they bought a small steamer, the Albion, and peddled their brew up-Sound as far as Seattle.

Unfortunately prohibition came along and put a stop to brewing. Except for these minor digressions from the timber business, Port Angeles stuck pretty well to logging and allied milling during the first half of the 20th Century. But, after the shaking-up of World War II, and a rather startling influx of strangers, the town decided to stand back and have a look at itself. More next Sunday A History of the North Olympic Peninsula by Patricia Campbell Family heirlooms Age has not impaired the delicate beauty of this vase with its tracery of white design over pale lavender glaze. The date on the bottom is 1715.

It is a family heirloom of John Cowan, who lives near Sekiu. The cup and saucer belonged to Mrs. Cowan's grandmother. Elegant in shape, the outside is rose and gold over pale green background, and the inside lined in gold. Daily News photo by Virginia Keeting Bicentennial research done by Library of Congress Among the major national contributions to the bicentennial is the Library of Congress' program of bicentennial bibliographies, research aids, publications, exhibits and musical productions drawn from the library's unparalleled collection of Revolutionary War materials.

Directed by Elizabeth Hamer Kegan, the assistant librarian of Congress, with the assistance of 10 leading historians who serve on an advisory board, the library's bicentennial program is entitled "Liberty and Learning." The library's major bicentennial publication, funded with a grant from the Ford Foundation, is "Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774-1789," consisting of approximately 25 volumes of more than 20,500 letters, ui.d diary entries composed by delegates to the Continental Congress and the Congress of the Confederation. Source materials for scholars have been published. These include "A Decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind," "Congressional Justification of American Policy Before Independence," and "English Defenders of American Freedom, 1774-1789," a collection of scarce Revolutionary period pamphlets. The library also has engaged in research on the first printing of the Declaration of Independence. The library's major bicentennial exhibition "To Set a Country Free" continues through the year, tracing the Revolutionary War era through the display of rare books, manuscripts, prints, engravings, broadsides, maps and newspapers drawn from the library's collections.

A number of bibliographic aids on the Revolution also have been published, together with a series of guides to the library's resources. Two facsimiles also are available for public sale, one of Paul Revere's engraving of the Boston Massacre and another of two rebuses (a form of puzzle in words and pictures) from 1778. With a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the library has produced a 15-record anthology of American folk music. Information on any of these and other programs is available from the Library of Congress, Information Office, Washington, D.C. 20540.

Bicentennial Times From a Great American Savings Loan Association hy permission ol Till: Hl.lTMA\\ AK( IIIVI 1844: The world gets a message. Our country is still new. But we've become as sophisticated as the best of them. We have bright men working in back rooms on ideas no one else ever thought of. We've even established a Patent Office, to make sure those ideas don't get stolen.

One of the brightest is Samuel F.B. Morse. He's a pretty good painter. But he's also been busy since 1832 working on an electric telegraph. It's a very clever way of getting a message through without sending it person-to- person.

Twelve years after he starts, he gets his patent and sends his first message: "What hath God wrought." There's an idea. It can tell the East about raids in the West. It can tell the West about Congress in Washington. Without taking days and weeks. Some say if Morse, instead of that fellow named Trumbull, had been commissioned to paint the big pictures in the Capitol, he would have forgotten about the telegraph.

We're glad he Savings Accounts We're kind of a money farm. You plant a few dollars with us on a regular basis, and in no time they sprout into enough to have a field day with. Open a Green Pastures savings account at The Money Growers Association. We pay acres of interest, compounded daily. SAVINGS IIOAN "We look to your future with interest THE MONEY GROWERS OSSQCIRTION Cur Regular Passbook Savings X4 per annum Port Angolot Saving! Loan Ann.

101 W. Front, Port 215 Tcylor, I.