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Warren Spruce Company after Siletz Spruce

 

Jae. Manary, representing the Warren Spruce Co., arrived in Toledo last Saturday and at once making arrangements to get the Siletz spruce for the government.

 

This company has contracts from the government that will take all the airplane spruce that there is in Siletz.  They are building a warehouse 24 by 100 feet in size at the future camp site.  This is the first of a series of buildings to be built.

 

It is not know for certain yet whether a railroad will be built in tidewater on the Sitletz, to bring out the spruce, or whether they will plank and gravel the county roads and bring it out with auto trucks.

 

Some of the finest spruce in the world is located in this county and we hope it can all be gotten out to do its bit toward canning the Kaiser.

 

Lincoln County Leader, 1918

 

 

 

Spruce Brigades

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Spruce Brigades were a part of the Spruce production Division of the Army Signal Corp and were members of the Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen, a union to establish support for the war effort.

 

When the Army arrived on the coast early in 1918, the lumbermen were trying to organize with the help of the Union of Industrial Workers of the World.  The Army resolved the differences between mill owners and the lumbermen by extablishing the same rules for the mills and loggers as the Signal Corp.  The 8-hour work day was one of the benefits.  The mill owners didn't like having the Army involved in their businesses, but they did like the stability it brought to the work force.

 

There were 60 camps established in the Northwest but not all of them were used because the war ended on the Eleventh month, on the Eleventh day, on the Eleventh hour, 1918.

 

The Army immediately stopped production dead in its tracks!  In a very short time all the equipment purchased by the Army was removed from the mills, sent to Vancouver, and put up for auction.

 

While this was an abrupt departure, they did leave behind well-developed logging roads, a railroad system extending well into the forests, bars on many of the small bay inlets, and port improvements up and down the Northwest coastline.

 

[For more information read "The Spruce Brigades" by Rod Crossley.]