Mossback’s Northwest: Lumberjacks, meet the Lumberjills

Sitka spruce was lighter than steel, flexible, buckle- and shatter-resistant. The virtues of the wood were well-known to Indigenous people, who built with it and used its pitch and resin for glue and waterproofing. When the first European explorers arrived in the region, they took tall, straight spruce trees for masts and, when Royal Navy rum rations ran out, crews brewed an alcoholic “spruce beer” in its place made by fermenting spruce needles with molasses.

The post-WWI period saw the value of spruce continue for aircraft. Sitka spruce was planted in Scotland, where soil and climate were conducive. It made sense from a national-defense standpoint in the 1920s, but by the time World War II rolled around, aluminum had mostly replaced spruce in planes, especially warplanes. That metal, though, could also be in short supply, so again, Sitka spruce was drafted.

Spruce and plywood were used in aircraft that carried troops and cargo into war zones, like the gliders used on D-Day. Britain’s de Havilland aircraft company designed a twin-engine, fast-and-light combat bomber, the Mosquito, that was made largely of wood, including Sitka spruce. It was called the “Wooden Wonder,” and some called it “Mossie.” (I wonder why that caught my attention?)

Demand for timber and Sitka spruce boomed during the war years, and as in other industries, a large chunk of the labor shortage was filled by women. If the Northwest logging business had been dominated by Bunyanesque lumberjacks, the war years saw cadres of so-called “Lumberjills” enter the woods.

Of course, they had been there for a long while. Historian Robert Walls says women have had a largely uncredited role in timber history. In WWI, some women had taken mill work and timber jobs generally held by teenage boys in logging camps — as whistle punks, for example. Whistle punks acted as signalers between those who “choked” the wood with cable and the donkey-engine operators whose machines then hauled the wood up and out of the logged zone. And women had long been cooks, bunkhouse maids and camp bookkeepers. As independent family logging operators came on the scene in the 1930s and flourished after the war, women’s roles continued — critical players much like women who run and work on family farms.