Historic Hood River

Notes

Here’s a fine image of one of the ocean going log rafts which took millions of board feet of northwest timber down to California for processing.  We saw images of them in this post and this post.  In those posts we learned from experts that H. R. Robertson pioneered ocean going log rafts way back in 1886, before moving to the west coast in 1889 where he built rafts to take logs to San Francisco.  Simon Benson’s competing operation began at Clatskanie in 1906.

This image is from a collection of photographs with wonderful annotations from the time when Captains Luke and Dean Nichols were plying the Columbia.  They tell the story of Luke Nichols tiring of the economic struggles with logging mills north of Underwood.  He bought some fishing boats and used them to tow log rafts to Portland through the Cascade Locks circa 1928.  Luke’s son Dean’s wife was granddaughter of George Card.  George Card had been constructing these rafts since the 1890s, so presumably he worked in Robertson’s operation.

You can see one of the forms they used to construct the rafts off to the right.  A single raft could represent a full year’s production for a lumber operation.  Construction was located down river from Portland, and would be timed so the spring floods could be used to float the rafts free from the forms.  We’ll see a better view of the forms and booms tomorrow.

Captain Luke Nichol’s founded Nichols Boatworks with his brother Mark, but he left to found Nichols Trading Post.

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