Communities

From sawing logs to serving cappuccino?

Heather Abel Oct. 16, 1995 From the print edition
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  One hundred and forty-two years ago, a timber company built a sawmill and the town to operate it, Port Gamble, across the Puget Sound from Seattle, Wash. This October, the nation's oldest continually operating sawmill is closing. The company, Pope & Talbot, that built the mill and now leases it from Pope Resources Co., says high prices for logs and stringent environmental regulations have forced it out. Both company officials and residents predict that the new economic base of the town, population approximately 100, will be tourism.


The mill's closure did not come as a surprise. After the night staff was laid off last spring, only 96 mill workers remained, down from 250 during the mill's heyday. Yet residents not only worked at the mill for five generations, they also lived in company houses, shopped at company stores and watched movies at the company theater. Some sacrificed fingers and hearing to the sawmill's teeth and roar.


Now, Frank Johnson Jr., a sawmill operator for 41 years, worries about the transformation of his working town into a cluster of knick-knack shops, restaurants and bed-and-breakfast inns. "It's going to be a yuppie joint," he told The Oregonian. - Heather Abel


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