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Tuesday, March 19, 2024
March 19, 2024

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Sprucing up Pearson: Scale model details 1918 mill

By , Columbian Science, Military & History Reporter
Published:
4 Photos
Gary Brooks said he's put about 1,200 hours into Pearson Air Museum's 8-foot-by-30-foot scale model of the 1918 spruce cut-up mill.
Gary Brooks said he's put about 1,200 hours into Pearson Air Museum's 8-foot-by-30-foot scale model of the 1918 spruce cut-up mill. Photo Gallery

If you go

What: Pearson Air Museum (also the temporary Fort Vancouver Visitors Center).

Where: 1115 E. Fifth St.; free admission.

When: Summer hours, Monday through Saturday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m.; Sunday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Winter hours (Nov. 3 to March 9), Monday through Saturday, 9 a.m.-4 p.m.; Sunday, 10 a.m.-4 p.m.

Cost: free admission.

Did you know?

• One surviving spruce mill structure still is in use at Fort Vancouver. It’s now known as the Headquarters Building, along East Fifth Street, just west of Pearson Air Museum and next to the Chkalov transpolar flight monument. It was built in 1918 as the spruce mill finance office, said museum manager Bob Cromwell, a National Park Service archaeologist. It was built about 400 feet to the west and moved to its present site by the Army. Another vintage structure at Pearson was rumored to be a holdover from the World War I spruce mill era, but recent research shows it was built in 1921, Cromwell said.

Even in miniature, the mill is immense.

The 50-acre spruce cut-up mill built almost a century ago at Vancouver Barracks is being re-created inside Pearson Air Museum. It’s actually on a portion of the original mill grounds at what now is Fort Vancouver National Historic Site.

With a layout measuring about 30 feet long by 8 feet wide, model builder Gary Brooks makes it more approachable by explaining tiny details.

Those narrow catwalks running along the roof peaks of several buildings? They’re walkways for fire-watchers, Brooks said. With fire a constant concern, lookouts were always patrolling. Tiny rooftop structures that look like tool sheds were used for storing fire hoses, Brooks said.

Brooks pointed out a tiny structure on a loading dock. Little more than a roof, it covers an open-air saw that sliced scrap lumber into firewood for stoves in the soldiers’ tents.

Brooks, an Oregon dentist and history buff, said he’s made a lot of models of old Northwest lumber mills — some up to 8 feet long. But nothing this big.

“Nothing here is unusual. There is just a lot of it,” said Brooks, who lives in Willamina, Ore., about 55 miles southwest of Portland.

Brooks traces his hobby’s roots back to when he and his wife moved into an old farmhouse. The farm site had no TV reception, but the barn provided a great spot for a model-making shop as Brooks gradually reduced his dental practice.

Brooks met museum manager Bob Cromwell through a mutual acquaintance a year ago. Since then, Brooks has volunteered about 1,200 hours of his time on the project. The National Park Service is providing materials.

The U.S. Army’s Spruce Production Division mobilized 30,000 troops in the late stages of World War I, cutting and processing Northwest spruce favored by military aircraft manufacturers.

Built on polo field

About 5,000 of those soldiers were stationed in Vancouver, where the world’s biggest spruce mill was built on the barracks’ polo field. Construction work on the mill started on Dec. 14, 1917, and it was operating by Feb. 7, 1918.

If you go

&#8226; What: Pearson Air Museum (also the temporary Fort Vancouver Visitors Center).

&#8226; Where: 1115 E. Fifth St.; free admission.

&#8226; When: Summer hours, Monday through Saturday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m.; Sunday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Winter hours (Nov. 3 to March 9), Monday through Saturday, 9 a.m.-4 p.m.; Sunday, 10 a.m.-4 p.m.

&#8226; Cost: free admission.

Huge rough-cut slabs of spruce called cants were shipped here from logging camps and milled into lumber that was shipped to aircraft factories. About 70 percent of the milled spruce went to aircraft plants in Great Britain, France and Italy.

Like those mill hands — who eventually turned out a million board feet of spruce a day — Brooks did a lot of his work by running wood through a saw. He also used a dental technique to mass produce some components, including molding hundreds of the tents that in real life housed six soldiers apiece.

“I’m a dentist. I can make a mold of anything,” Brooks said.

The display was done to the 1-to-87 scale used in HO model railroading. That enabled Brooks to add functioning railroad tracks to the layout, along with model train cars. (Rail transport was the key to the operation. The Spruce Production Division built 13 separate railroads.)

Each day, about 100 rail cars arrived with raw material or left with milled spruce.

To provide another sense of scale, there is a “You are here” marker at the northeast corner of the display table, showing where the museum was built over part of the original mill site.

Did you know?

&#8226; One surviving spruce mill structure still is in use at Fort Vancouver. It's now known as the Headquarters Building, along East Fifth Street, just west of Pearson Air Museum and next to the Chkalov transpolar flight monument. It was built in 1918 as the spruce mill finance office, said museum manager Bob Cromwell, a National Park Service archaeologist. It was built about 400 feet to the west and moved to its present site by the Army. Another vintage structure at Pearson was rumored to be a holdover from the World War I spruce mill era, but recent research shows it was built in 1921, Cromwell said.

Burner to bake house

A prominent landmark near the center of the display is a huge circular structure that was identified in old maps as a waste burner. Today, the northeast corner of the reconstructed Fort Vancouver stockade and the replica Hudson’s Bay Co. bake house is right where that circular concrete burner stood in 1918.

Brooks’ 8-foot-wide layout represents the active production portion of the spruce mill. Almost as much space was covered by stacks of spruce, an area that extended south almost to the Columbia River, Brooks said. Including that area would have expanded his model to 15 feet wide, he said.

The mill operated for only about 11 months — from February 1918 to November 1918 — said Cromwell, a National Park Service archaeologist. But the operation was documented by many archive photographs that Brooks used for his research.

There also was a short-lived Spruce Division newspaper — “Straight Grain” — with stories that provided details of several buildings. (Copies of the Dec. 14, 1918 and Dec. 21, 1918, editions are on a table.)

In quickly, out quickly

After the war, the whole operation was quickly torn down, with the Army disposing of Spruce Production Division assets at yard-sale prices.

“The Army got in quickly and wanted to get out quickly,” Cromwell said.

Both versions of the spruce mill — the WWI facility and Brooks’ scale model — are good examples of focused production, by the way. Turning a 50-acre field into the world’s biggest spruce mill in less than two months showed what the Army could do when it didn’t care how much money and how many soldiers the task required, Cromwell said.

And the skills that enabled Brooks to take on this model-making challenge? It’s an example, Brooks said, of what you can do when you go 25 years without watching TV.

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Columbian Science, Military & History Reporter