Back When? 1900-1950 Life in the Logging Camps of OR

 The mobile Brooks-Scanlon logging camp known as BS Tanks, is now little more than a wooden sign in the woods southeast of Bend—but for Dixie Caverhill Weberg, it was the first home she ever knew. “I was only three years old, but I can still hear the ‘foosh’ of the steam coming from the black monster as it came to a stop at the water tower beside my parents’ logging camp shack,” Dixie recalled. “I loved that sound and would sit on our porch step every day to greet the smelly locomotive and wave at the engineers.” Dixie’s memories of growing up in the logging camps stretch from the mid-1940s into the 1950s—an era when families lived in simple wood shacks that could be hoisted onto flatcars and moved from one forest stand to the next. “You could have called them early-day mobile homes,” she joked. Her family’s shack, like the others, had just the basics: a few windows, a door, a cook stove—and gaps wide enough for snow to blow through. “I woke up one morning to white lines of snow across the heavy quilt my grandmother had made for me,” she wrote. When logging operations moved to a new stand of timber, the whole town moved with them. One of the biggest moves she remembered was from a site south of Bend to a spot just west of Sisters. The homes—about 30 in all—were craned up and rolled out on the rails. For Dixie and the other kids, it was a game to spot whose house was whose as the train passed over the highway trestle. “Our stovepipe was rolling from side to side,” she wrote, “and we were so afraid it would fall off.” These weren’t just work camps—they were close-knit communities. In the Sisters camp, there was a small grocery store run by a Scottish couple, Scotty and Peggy Low. Scotty had lost a leg in a logging accident and ran the store with a mix of grit and humor. The oiled floors were pocked with holes from loggers’ cork boots, and the smell of pine, produce, and candy made it a magical place for any child. “I always looked for the big yellow cat who patrolled the store for mice,” Dixie wrote. “When she wasn’t curled up between the canned goods.” The arrival of the Oregon Trunk Railroad in 1911 made industrial-scale logging possible in Central Oregon. By 1916, two massive mills—Shevlin Hixon on the west side of the Deschutes River and Brooks Scanlon on the east—were running full steam, supplied by ever-growing networks of rail lines that stretched deep into the pine forests. Logging operations were portable by design. Shevlin Hixon, for instance, maintained a self-contained railroad logging town that moved with the timber, hauling its buildings, families, and operations to new sites every few years. The largest and longest-standing of these was LaPine Camp (1932 1942), followed by Summit and Chemult Camps. Each location had a school, cookhouse, barber shop, bathhouse, and even a post office and soda fountain. Workers often rode into the woods each morning in “crummies,” rough crew buses packed with gear, lunch pails, and thermoses. By the mid-20th century, logging technology began to shift from rail to road. Steam gave way to internal combustion engines, and the great mobile camps became less necessary. The last log train in Central Oregon ran in December 1956. Now the towns themselves are mostly gone. Only a few signs mark their existence. A few company houses from the Gilchrist mill town remain, and in Prineville, the Bowman Museum preserves some of the stories and memories: “If there were fears from out side worldly sources, we kids didn’t know much about it,” she wrote. “We had steam trains and candy stores, hide-and-seek at dusk, and parents calling us home from their porches. We were happy.” ~Dixie Caverhill Weberg