Clark County History: Sitka Spruce mill

A tree won World War I — the Sitka spruce. It formed airplane bodies and wings since aviation’s early days because its wood possessed the unique qualities of durability, strength, flexibility and lightness. Early airplane builders, including the Wright Brothers, had difficulty getting spruce. The red spruce found in the Northeastern forests didn’t grow to the heights needed.

Only the Sitka spruce growing along the Pacific Northwest coast grew tall enough. When the United States joined the Allies in WWI, they knew Allied air power depended on building airplanes with Sitka. But the Northwest forests crawled with the anti-capitalist International Workers of the World. In 1916 in Everett, special anti-union deputies massacred 31 members on Bloody Sunday, increasing concerns for logging labor stability.

That worried Gen. John Pershing and Secretary of War Newton Baker. Together they convinced Brice Disque, former Army captain, to reenlist and head up the Spruce Production Division. The new division would settle the disruptive labor conditions that might slow the war effort. The Army took over lumber production and quelled labor unrest for the first time.

Disque toured lumber camps, finding loggers working under harsh conditions but less radical than IWW members. He concluded the way to solve the labor turmoil was to use soldiers. He would also create a new group, the Legion of Loyal Loggers and Lumbermen, or 4L, committed to improving camp and mill life while eliminating IWW anarchy.

Controlling the 4L and the Spruce Production Division, Disque gained unprecedented power over a lumber industry not yet organized around the production of airplane-grade spruce. Loggers usually worked 12- to 14-hour days but had been striking for the eight-hour day. Disque shifted to the shorter day in March 1918 and said he would assign Spruce Production Division soldiers to the camps that complied. These steps soothed the labor situation. Still, existing sawmills couldn’t meet the demand. So he constructed a big one in Vancouver, near the Columbia River and the railway.

In 45 days, Disque erected the nation’s largest mill to shape spruce, called the Spruce Cut-up Plant. By 1918, the mill reached the required total of 10 million board feet a month and reached 22 million by the war’s end. Twenty months after America joined the Allies against the Germans, the war was over. By then, Disque’s staff included 30,000 SPD soldiers and 125,000 4L members, even former IWW members. Moreover, he’d produced 143 million board feet, an increase of 1,700 percent.

He should have been a war hero. But politicians intervened. Despite 10,000 Allied planes built with American spruce, no U.S.-built planes saw action in Europe. The House Subcommittee on Aviation wanted to know why and called Disque to testify. They questioned each decision he’d made. In the end, the panel cleared him but sullied his reputation and left him disillusioned.

When Pershing returned victorious from Europe, he found his country planting memorial trees honoring the 117,000 Americans who died overseas. Among his first act was planting a tree in New York’s Central Park, one of several he planted. Each tree was also an unacknowledged salute to the tree that won the war.

Martin Middlewood is editor of the Clark County Historical Society Annual. Reach him at ClarkCoHist@gmail.com.