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IMPORTED & DOMESTIC HARDWOODS.. ...IMPORTED PLYWOOD

IU,YIBER SHIPS

(Continued, lrom Page B)

Twenty-frve years of development lie be. tween the little wheezers of the Mend6cino Coast and the giant Wapama, but in essentials they remained quite similar. The Wapama was built at St. Helens, Oregon, in 1915, by the St. Helens Ship Building Company, one of a complex of St. Helen's lumber industries owned by Charles R. McCormick of San Francisco. Like nearly all of the steam schooners, she was at least in part a San Francisco product, for if her wooden hull were built in the forests of the northwest, her machinery was manufactured and installed in San Francisco.

Charles McCormick had bought his first steam schoonerCascadein 1904 and parlayed her into a steam schooner fleet which included the Klamath. Shoshone. Yellowstone, Yosemite, Multnomah, Willamette, Celilo, Ernest H. Meyer, Everett, Wahkeena, and lVapama. Most were outfitted to carry a large number of passengers, and the McCormick steamers, each with its familiar star.marked funnel, were well known along the coast as well-run ships and "good feeders."

The Wapama was a fine example of the typical oosingle-ended" steam sehooner (engine room and superstructure aft, in the tradition of the early steam schooners); she was about as big as a single-ender could be built-205 feet long 951 tons, with a lumber capacity of 1,050,000 board feet-and had accommodations for over 30 passengers. For their benefit she was outfitted with a curving staircase leading down from a spacious lounge into a comfortable dining saloon, a touch well-calculated to offset the cramped squalor of her tiny cabins.

A total of some 225 wooden steam schooners were built on the Pacific Coast, the first of the type appearing at San Francisco before 1884, and the last being the oodoubleended" Esther Johnson, built-at Portland in 1923. The steam schooners were manned largely with first generation North Europeans, and the fleet came to ,be known as California's "Scandinavian Navy." Johnsons, Olsens, and Carlsons were so numer. ous that the skippers were differentiated by nicknames: "Midnight" Olsen, ooCaspar

Charlie" Carlson,'oSafe-is-Openo' Gunderson, "Port Wine" Ellefsen, and scores of others.

The Wapama,'after she was sold by McCormick, served the 'owhite Flyer Line" between San Pedro and San Francisco; before the Second Warld War she turned northward, to Alaskan waters, where she ended her active career, under the flag of the Alaska Transportation Company, in 1947.

C. A. THAYER

The C. A. Thayer is typical of the lumber carriers developed on the Pacific Coast during the last great days of sail. Big for a three-masted schooner-measuring 156' in length, 36'in breadth,453 tons, and with a cargo capacity of 575,000 board feet, the C. A. Thayer stands halfway between the little two-masters that scuttled into Mendocino o'dog-holes" in the '60's and '70's and the last huge four-and five-masters that slid down the ways to meet the shipping crisis of the First World War.

The Thayer was built in 1895 by Hans D. Bendixsen at Fairhaven, across the narrows of Humboldt Bay from the town of Eureka. She was one of 35 three-masters built by Bendixsen, one oI 122 built on the West Coast.

The C. A. Thayer was built for the E. K. Wood Lumber Co., and was named for one of the partners in the firm. She operated be-

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