The War Years

Loading a logging truck.
Courtesy U.S. Forest Service

I started work serious when I was about seventeen. I had a few odd jobs before that. Summer vacation why I'd stay with my grandparents and work on the farm and when I was seventeen that year, why everyone had gone off to war and everybody was hollering "they needed help, they needed help," so I went to work at this sawmill in southern Oregon.
--Charles Plummer, logger and mill worker, 1999.

By the mid-1940s, Cottage Grove became a leader in Oregon lumber production. Prior to World War II, Washington's Puget Sound and Gray's Harbor and sites along the Columbia River overshadowed Willamette Valley timber production. But by mid-century, due to overcutting in these areas, the Willamette mills gained prominence. In 1943, the larger Cottage Grove area had 12 mills and 6 work camps, but by 1951 boasted 27 mills and 42 camps. During this period, the prominent Woodard Lumber Mill sold its operation to Weyerhaeuser which is one of the few remaining mills still operating near Cottage Grove today.