Moving the memorial to Crown Park made sense considering the park’s history, Lam said, adding: “Crown Park was also donated to the city by the mill, so it was a fitting new home for this memorial, tying the long history between the city and the mill.”
With a Crown Park revamp in the works, Lam recommended to Camas Parks and Recreation Commission members in early December that the city move the memorial sooner rather than later, “before the park gets redeveloped, so folks can visit it now.”
Lam pitched two site options to the parks commission on Dec. 8: Option A, located near the corner of Northeast Division Street and Northeast 15th Avenue, and Option B, near the park’s entrance off Northeast Everett Street and Northeast 17th Avenue.
The first option, near the park’s southwest corner, would place the memorial close to an existing monument that pays tribute to the Crown Willamette Paper Co.’s donation of Crown Park to the people of Camas on Dec. 14, 1934.
Some commission members believed Option B was too close to a large, grassy field where people gather for soccer matches, Easter egg hunts and other annual events.
In the end, the parks commissioners agreed that Option A was the better choice, voting unanimously to place the monument near the corner of Division and 15th. The commissioners also instructed staff to look into raising the monument up onto a piece of concrete to make the plaque honoring World War II veterans and millworkers more visible.
“Now that we have solidified the new location for the monument, the next step is to work through the specific details to determine how and when the monument gets moved,” Lam told The Post-Record in mid-December.
