TRAVCO, INC.

wHotEsAtE IUMBER & PLYWOOD

Out o[ the Woods

Bv Jim Stevens

North Bank.

The historic Cowlitz region is nearly all evergreen countr1', forest land forever, reaching away west to Willapa Bay, at'av east to the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, St. Helens and Adams Mountains, ancient Vancouver and with Camas. the paper town, around the river bend.

Betlveen the national forests, high on the west slope of the Cascades, and the Pacific are the great industrial tree farms of the Long-Bell Lumber Company and the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company, with like forestry enterprises of the Crou'n Zellerbach Corporatior, on the fringes of the Cou'litz scene. On the Cowlitz there are Castle Rock and Kelso. On the Columbia shines the beauty of the model industrial community planned by Robert Alexander Long and his Long-Bell Lumber Company associates, then built b1' them rvhen they moved up from Southern forests in the earlv 1920s.

New Age of Forest Fiber

The \\'eyerhaeuser Timber Company,, principal timber owner of the region, opened a second sawmill at Longvierv in l9D, giving the nerv city the two "biggest sawmills in the world." The Longview Fibre Company became the community's third large forest product enterprise, utilizing items of rvood that had been logging and sawmill leftovers in the common course of lumbering because of unmarketabllrtv.

W.y".h"".rser built a woodpulp production plant, and other plants through the years 1930-1950, to make everything from rvood that might find a market-even turning out bark products at last. The Long-Bell Lumber Company likervise made steady progress in wood utilization.

These enterprises, resulting from engineering, chemical

PEGGY GREENWOOD SCOII GOUTD DEI, TRAVIS

and other technical forest products research, have not only added to wages and dividends-and to taxes, of coursewith every board foot of wood rescued from logging and sawmill scrap piles, but have fortified the forestry management programs in the timber.

Dead snags and windfalls, for example, are now largely salvaged and utilized. Grades of logs that in the 1920s could not be made to yield marketable lumber or plyu'ood, now go forth to be converted into forest fiber and bark products for which intensive national sales promotion and advertising have made market accetpance.

Tokens of Tomorrow

All through the Douglas fir, and the pineries too, the o\t''ners of woods and mills, old and new, large and small, have taken heart from the faith that brought Longview into being at the turn of the 1920s, and from the works in forest products development and in tree far mforestry for permanence of the enterprises that have followed.

New products of wood, new machinery and production techniqes, new markets, new product values discovered in prevalent species that once were termed "weed {1sss"tlre West Coast hemlock, the lodgepole pine-new realizable values in young growth on old cutovers, new rvood conversion processes, as for the making of molasses, sugar and ethyl alcohol from sawdust, and,woodpulp production residuals, new forces of defense against the forest fireof such are the substantial prospects for the future of man's use of Washington State's entire 19,874pril acres of "commercial forest land."

The lost lands are being found again. The big burns are greening up. The cutovers are coming back.

Iniunclion Forbids Pickeling

On June 4th Judge John A. Hewicker granted a permanent injunction to the Valley Lumber Company, of Escondido, California, against picketing by two building trade unons, and ordered the unions to pay the firm $1,000 for past picketing.