EARLY OYSTERMEN tong for oysters near the narrows in Oakland Bay.

Pioneer oystermen reportedly shipped their first sales from the Kamilche Post Office in 1878. The industry grew rapidly. Joseph Gale’s harvesters and others lived on floathouses easily moved from oyster bed to oyster bed. Local oysters went by rowboat and steamboat to restaurants in the capital city. (A popular theory for the selection of Olympia as state capitol was its proximity to oyster beds). Oysters by the bushel and gunnysack went off by ship to feed the rich in San Francisco.

By 1887, innovative harvesters were crisscrossing their beaches with wooden dikes to keep the sensitive little Olympia oysters covered at low tide. Despite efforts to enhance the beaches, some local beaches were depleted, and the Puget Sound Oyster Association was formed for replanting. In 1902, when local harvesters were selling more than 20,000 sacks of oysters a year, rich seed grounds were set aside by the Mason County Board of Oyster Land Commissioners, namely Thomas O’Neill, J.A. Gale and Thomas Frazer.

The Rayonier pulp mill’s effect on Oakland Bay combined with over-harvesting to render the succulent little native oyster all but extinct in the 1930s. Now, stocks of introduced Pacific oysters, brought from Asia and developed commercially by local aquaculturists, are planted routinely, using “culch” shells inoculated with larvae hatched in tanks.

Shortly after Washington became a state in 1889, the Callow Act provided a way for oystermen to apply for ownership of tidelands on which they cultivated oysters. The Callow Act is credited with stabilizing the shellfish industry.

And a stable economic presence it has been. Early oystermen included S. K. Taylor, who secured land in Oyster Bay and whose descendants today operate Taylor Shellfish, tied with Simpson Timber Company as the county’s seventh-largest employer. Four hundred people harvest and retail clams, oysters and mussels for Taylor.

Other shellfish firms remain in family ownership too. Frank Bishop of Little Skookum Shellfish Company sees in his grandson the fifth generation of pioneer oysterman Dan Lynch’s family. He hopes water quality, the linchpin of the industry, will maintain the industry their forebears have enjoyed.

Mason County’s multimillion-dollar shellfish industry depends on healthy septic systems, sewer systems in high-density areas, and controlled runoff. Water quality is more than esthetic here. It’s economics.

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Logging: an industry in transition

Logging came early to Mason County. Not the earliest among the so-called “timber barons,” but the one who influenced the local industry most, was Sol Simpson.

Simpson was a newly married Canadian from Quebec when he moved to Seattle, Washington Territory, in 1876. He worked as a teamster in Seattle, and in 1887 was hired to grade right-of-way for Port Blakely Mill’s Puget Sound and Grays Harbor Railroad in Mason County. In Sol, Mary (“Tollie”) and their two daughters moved to Kamilche, and by 1888, he was in charge of all Port Blakely operations.

Where we work now Mason County’s top employer, according to a recent study by the Economic Development Council, is Little Creek Casino Resort with 696 employees. The EDC’s top 30: 1. Little Creek Casino Resort 696 2. Shelton School District 675 3. Wash. Corrections Center 581 4. Mason General Hospital 495 5. Wal-Mart 420 6. Mason County 411 7/8. Simpson Timber Company 400 7/8. Taylor Shellfish 400 9. Olympic Panel Products 360 10. North Mason School Dist. 350 11. Squaxin Island Indian Tribe 237 12. Mason Co. Forest Products 170 13. Fir Lane Health & Rehab 135 14. Alderbrook Resort & Spa 125 15. Skokomish Indian Tribe 121 16. Island Enterprises (Squaxin) 117 17/18. Mason County PUD 3 114 17/18. City of Shelton 114 19. Pioneer School District 110 20. Stretch Island Fruit 106 21. Fred Meyer Marketplace 105 22. Safeway (Shelton, Belfair) 104 23. Sims Vibration Laboratory 101 24. Welco-Skookum Lumber 99 25/26. Alpine Way Retirem’nt 96 25/26 Exceptional Foresters 96 27. Green Diamond Resource Co 91 28. Mason Transit 84 29. Catholic Community Servcs 82 30. Our Community Credit Union 81

A revolutionary in terms of logging operations, Simpson invested income in timberland and used horses, rather than oxen, to move logs. He formed his own company in 1890, and was soon logging 100 million board feet a year, changing the landscape and establishing the economy that would be bedrock for Mason County for years to come. He hired Mark Reed in 1896. Reed managed Lumbermen’s Mercantile, the company store; with partners, set up affiliate Phoenix Logging Company; and perhaps most importantly, married Simpson’s daughter Irene. Today, the company Sol Simpson started and Mark Reed propelled into prominence has dropped from its pinnacle as the county’s largest employer, but still provides jobs for 400 workers in the county (with the 91 workers working for its resource arm, Green Diamond, it would rank fifth among employers). Adding other firms among the county’s top employers, logging and milling of wood products employ 1,404 people.

Times have changed in the woods. Simpson’s horse teams gave way to steam donkeys. Railroads have given way to trucks, and although log trains still run from Simpson’s Mill 5 near Lake Nahwatzel to the Shelton waterfront, the railroad no longer runs down the main street in Shelton. Fellers and buckers and rigging slingers have been replaced by harvesting machines that prowl like mantises through the woods, cutting, limbing and bunching second- and third-growth trees for transport to the mills, where operations are computerized.

But these green hills still grow generations of trees to build growing communities across the country and overseas, and generations of local families have maintained the tradition of working “in the woods.”