Photos: A tale of the Northwest's logging past It was rough and tumble, not for the faint of heart

"Some 70 million acres of commercial forest land once covered the Pacific Northwest. Large Douglas firs, spruce, hemlock, and cedar trees grew west of the Cascade Range. Some firs grew over 300 feet tall, and some cedars reached 15 feet in diameter. In 1905, there were 189 lumber companies in King County alone, employing nearly 8,000 people. By 1910, Washington was the nation's largest lumber-producing state, and the industry employed almost two-thirds of the state's wage earners. This photo, taken around 1905, shows a giant fir tree at the Monroe Logging Company in Carnation, King County." -MOHAI. Photo courtesy MOHAI, Seattle Historical Society Collection, image number shs935. less "Some 70 million acres of commercial forest land once covered the Pacific Northwest. Large Douglas firs, spruce, hemlock, and cedar trees grew west of the Cascade Range. Some firs grew over 300 feet tall, and ... more Photo: Courtesy Seattle Municipal Archives Photo: Courtesy Seattle Municipal Archives Image 1 of / 63 Caption Close Photos: A tale of the Northwest's logging past 1 / 63 Back to Gallery

My grandfather once knocked my grandmother out cold.

Shortly after they were married, she had gone in to wake him for breakfast.

But, as I was always told, he came up swinging and knocked her right out.

It wasn't an act of domestic violence, but instead a hard-learned habit from his years working and living in logging camps.

Logging camps and mill towns in Western Washington were rough and tumble places where mostly single men worked 10-hour days, made decent pay and had few things to spend it on.

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Living in fairly isolated places most of the time, they drank, gambled and fought for entertainment, and slept in sometimes squalid bunkhouses where men might slit your throat for a few dollars in the dead of night (hence my grandfather's reaction to being woken up).

Seattle was in many ways only a larger variation of these smaller camps and mill towns, owing much of its success to first Henry Yesler's steam-powered sawmill, then to the giant shingle mills in Ballard and elsewhere in the area, said Leonard Garfield, executive director of the Museum of History and Industry.

"(That logging) character ended up establishing Seattle as a pretty rough place to live," Garfield said.

I never met my hard-swinging grandfather, Amos Roy Thompson, but he lived in some pretty rough places himself, places that, like Seattle, had vast stands of virgin timber just waiting to be harvested and turned into cash.

Roy got his start in the timber industry at a logging camp along the Hamma Hamma River, on the Olympic Peninsula, hauling logs for a fellow Norwegian who had once been a champion skier.

Roy and his brother Earl took to felling trees together the old-fashioned way: first chopping the notch to direct where the tree fell (called the undercut), and then cutting the tree down by hand with a crosscut saw.

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Throughout the Great Depression, Roy and Earl drifted from logging camp to logging camp around Washington and British Columbia, felling and bucking so fast together that they had their pick of jobs.

"If they didn't like the work or the pay, they would just pick up and go somewhere else," my uncle, Danny Thompson, tells me of the duo.

Roy finally wound up staying on to work near Longview, Washington for most of a decade, where he and my grandmother had their children -- my uncle in 1946 and my mother in 1948 -- while Earl went off to the Army and eventually to medical school.

Longview was planned and financed by Robert Long, then president of the Long-Bell Lumber Comapany, as a solution to providing housing and space for what would be declared the largest mill in the world at the time.

In 1950, Roy and family moved back to Port Townsend and he kept a foot in the logging industry for most of the rest of his life, though no longer living the tough life of logging camps.

Many cities and towns across Western Washington can trace their roots, or at least a part of their roots, back to early logging camps.

And while the industry has shrunk since its heyday in the early and mid-20th century, it remains an important piece of the economic puzzle in the region and a backbone of the culture.

Information for this story was gathered from historylink.org, the University of Washington, and through interviews with both family members and Leonard Garfield of MOHAI.

Daniel DeMay covers Seattle culture, business and transportation for seattlepi.com. He can be reached at 206-448-8362 or danieldemay@seattlepi.com. Follow him on Twitter: @Daniel_DeMay.

