Growing up at Simpson's Camp 3

This two-part story is from a memoir written by Jim Howell in the late 1990s. Jim was born in Hoquiam in 1929 and lived with his parents and two sisters at Simpson Logging Company's Camp 3 in the Skokomish Valley from 1934 to 1946.

"Growing up in Simpson's Camp 3 in the 1930s and 1940s was a unique experience. Our houses were close to each other, but our backyard was trees for miles and miles, with small lakes and streams, hills and canyons, abounding with wildlife.

The Skokomish River, down a steep canyon nearby, was home to steelhead trout. The smaller streams had mostly rainbow trout. About every three years, Lake West, at the edge of the camp, would freeze over in the winter thick enough to skate on. I remember one year it froze especially thick, and one night when there was a full moon there must have been half the people in camp skating and sledding on the lake. There were perhaps six or eight large bonfires. Then, to top it off, there was an eclipse of the moon. What a memorable night that was.

Our house was 14 feet wide and 32 feet long, with an addition for another bedroom and a bath, all uninsulated. I'm not sure of the year we got electricity, but before that we had no refrigeration and we used gasoline or kerosene lights, and wood burning stoves. I can remember ice forming inside our house on colder winter nights. Our washing machine was a gasoline powered Maytag on the back porch. The washed laundry would freeze between loads in winter until mother would hang it all over the inside of our house for drying.

The houses were built on logs, so that when moving camp you could just remove any built-on rooms and slip two cable slings under the log foundation. A steam crane would then lift the house onto a railroad flat car and off you went to the next camp.

The single men were housed in bunkhouses. These were railroad cars – two rows of them on railroad tracks – with a cupola or half top deck that provided light and ventilation. They were heated with hot water, had their own toilet and bath facilities, and were sort of a separate community from the camp houses.

The only "store" available in camp was what we called the commissary, where we got our mail and bought a few necessities, like loggers work clothes, snoose, cigarettes and candy. For cold pop and ice cream we had to go half the way through Skokomish Valley to a tiny store that also sold gasoline. There were some winters when the snow got too deep for auto traffic and people needed to go to Shelton for supplies, so Simpson would hook up a crummy (like a gutted railroad passenger car with benches along each side and in the middle) to the steam engine and take people into Shelton. We would have a few hours to shop and then go back to camp for a cold night's sleep.

Halloween was the time we looked forward to, second only to Christmas. There were many outhouses that needed rearranging and we were anxious to help. One Halloween night us kids were starting to help in the task of moving an outhouse from an upright to a horizontal position when all of a sudden the man inside started cussing and threatening us. We proceeded to push the outhouse over with the door on the underside. We weren't talking during this relocation, so this gentleman didn't know who to thank for our efforts, but we didn't really want any reward.

On another Halloween, the older boys swiped a four-wheeled hay wagon from Skokomish Valley, took it up to Camp 3, and placed it astraddle the peak of someone's shed.

There must have been at least one good and constructive thing we did as we grew up at old Camp 3, but right now it slips my mind."

To be continued...

■ Jan Parker is a researcher for the Mason County Historical Museum. She can be reached at [email protected]. Membership in the Mason County Historical Society is $25 per year. For a limited time, new members will receive a free copy of the book "Shelton, the First Century Plus Ten."