Historic Hood River

Notes

This image is captioned “Crew at Camp 3”.  It’s a companion to this post and this post from the Stanley Smith Lumber Company Camp 3.

This image of Camp 3 has something the other two didn’t:  shadows.  I think these shadows help make sense of the wide angle view we saw last week.  While the shadows aren’t perfect, shadows in this image shows the light was generally coming from the right, and definitely not the left.  That means the right is southerly, depending on the time of day.  My best guess is this image was taken near the end of the workday, as the sun lowered in the western sky, but it would take more study to be sure.

A few clues help us link this image to the wider one.  The men are posed in front of a building with two small windows on either side of a wide door opening, and crucially, the building has electric or telegraph wires coming into it at the upper right.  Looking at this image, you see this building is the rightmost in the cluster of four buildings.  While you can’t see this detail, the front left corner of the building in both images is supported by a large tree stump.

With this new evidence we can verify this camp was on the eastern bank of the creek, and the water is flowing downhill to the right.  We are looking at a small log holding pond feeding the logs into the flume for their journey down to Greenpoint Mill.  The wood structure which runs diagonally across the wider image tops the earthen dam making the pond.  Logs are forced to the left side to enter the flume along with some pond water, while the rest of the creek continues to the right.  It may seem like that flume is going uphill, but it’s not.

Is there more evidence?  You’ll have to wait until tomorrow, when I share details from a field trip to the likely site of this camp.  But today, you can appreciate how many men it took to  fell all that timber and move it along towards the mill.

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