Timberline Lodge; Doorways to the Past

[tone] The bronze tablet, which is directly in front of me on the [coping?] of this very wonderful building, Timberline Lodge, Mount Hood National Forest. Dedicated September 28, 1937, by the President of the United States as a monument to the skill and faithful performance of workers on the roles of the Works Progress Administration. [Applause]

So I take very great pleasure in dedicating this new adjunct, not only of national prosperity, but also as a place for generations of Americans to come in the days to come. (Applause) [New speaker] From high up on Mount Hood, the President of the United States has dedicated Timberline Lodge, a million dollar recreation spot in the Mount Hood National Forest, from Bonneville Dam where he spoke this morning, the President and his party motored seventy-six miles along the Columbia River and through giant pines, fir and hemlock up the slopes of Mount Hood to the 6,000 foot timberline level. Two or 3000 people from surrounding territory and from nearby towns have come up the slopes

in their steaming automobiles to see and hear the President speak. [Jack Meier] As I recall it, other than his aid - as you know, President Roosevelt was crippled - other than his aides who assisted him in moving around, I don't think they were over maybe three or four Secret Service men. You didn't see any walkie talkies, no attempt to hold back the crowds. We could stand around him, and he was a very gracious, very cordial man who shook everybody's hand. He took a great deal of personal pride. I must say that I think he took as much personal pride in Timberline Lodge as any achievement of the WPA. [Narrator] Interest in skiing began in Oregon in the late 1920s with a group of young people, members of the Cascade Ski Club. They built a small primitive shelter near Camp Blossom as a base for their climbing and skiing ventures on Mount Hood.

Jack Meyer was a member of the group. [Jack Meier] In the early '30s, the Junior Chamber of Commerce - the Portland Junior Chamber - had a winter sports committee. Which I happen to have served on those many years ago, and through the efforts of that committee, we formed what was known as - what became known as - the Oregon Winter Sports Association. I think its first name was the Portland Winter Sports Association. One of the mountain devotees in those days was a man by the name of E. J. Griffith who was a mountaineer, a climber and a skier of sorts, and subsequently Mr. Griffith was appointed the Administrator for the WPA. So with hat in hand and trepidation and fear of the establishment, a bunch of us youngsters at that time went to the WPA and said, "Would you consider building us a more modern and larger shelter facility somewhere up around Camp Blossom,

at the head of the timberline trail?" This intrigued E. J. Griffith because he too had suffered through the difficulties of using the existing cabin. And he said, "Well, we'll see what we can do." Well, make a long story short, out of that request grew what is known today as Timberline Lodge, and I can well-remember the first sketch just showed an octagonal fireplace, pretty much as you know it today with a couple of restrooms and facilities off of that. And each time some government official picked up a pencil, it got a little bigger and went a little further this way. Well, why don't we extend this wing, and this would make a good dining room and so forth and so on. [Narrator] And so the plans for Timberline Lodge began in 1935 when the United States was deep in its worst depression. Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal Program had set up the National Recovery Act, the Civilian Conservation Corps,

the Works Progress Administration. The WPA provided workmen, writers, and artists with employment on federally funded projects. Timberline Lodge was unique as a WPA project. Although it is a legacy of the '30s, still it belongs more to the mountain and the forest than to a particular time in history. [Linn Forrest] This is Linn Forrest, one of the architects of Timberland Lodge. All of the actual designing, working drawings, and the supervision was handled by the architects for the Forest Service, which was Tim [inaudible] Turner, Howard Gifford, Dean ?Rice?, and me. I think it's safe to say that we all were, at that time even, environmentalists. One thing that we wanted to use, the natural materials that would fit into the landscape there, to become a part of it.

They're good materials. We used huge, large boulders in our stonework. Some as much as eight feet long, and we did various other things to try to bring this building into scale. We had to - along with the scale of the buildings - we had to be concerned with the ice and the snow and the wind. Remember this location is very adjacent to the Historic Oregon Trail, and this again had a bearing on the kinds of things that we wanted to encompass in the building. And it had some bearing, I'm sure, on the selection of some Indian motifs. It's only fair to say that these were obtained from a [inaudible] scout manual, and we adapted them as we saw fit. I think they were very interesting and appropriate. The building has been called by various people a different style of architecture.

Some call it Cascadian. Others have other names. I don't believe the building has a "style" of architecture. I think once something has can be named by a style, it has become decadent. This building, I think is just an honest reflection of the type of thing that we wanted to accomplish to suit that environment and suffice for that environment. And I would call it, if anything, perhaps Northwest architecture. I would sure hate to call it a style. [Narrator] Construction of the lodge began in February 1936. Ward Gano was the U.S. Forest Service structural engineer whose first job was to survey the building site which was still buried deep beneath the snow. Next was the job of shoveling out the road to bring in workmen and equipment. [Ward Gano] The construction headquarters, or the camp, for the workmen was located at the Steel Creek

area down below the present highway. And the workmen were trucked back and forth from the camp to the lodge site every morning and every night in trucks like this. This photograph was probably taken the first part of August of 1936. It's showing the East Wing of the lodge is pretty well framed in. The West Wing of the lodge is also pretty well along and the Head House is just being erected. The six columns that form the hexagon interior of the lobby are in place, and it appears that with that gin pole, they are about ready to erect the roof trusses.

Girders at the heads of the columns there are probably in the order of eight to nine feet deep, and they are tremendously heavy. The columns themselves came from what at that time was the Colombia National Forest and and is now the Gifford Pinchot National Forest in the state of Washington. They were brought to the site as round timbers. They were probably, oh, in the area of five to six feet in diameter - pine logs - and then they were adzed into shape on the site, adzed and broad-axed I should say, because it was quite a sight to watch those men that were skilled in the use of the broad axe shape always columns from

their rough, round configuration to a very fine hexagon shape. The rock for the outside walls of the lodge came from the area right around the building site. Actually, these rocks were a veneer on top of a concrete wall behind them. [A. P. DiBenedetto] Most of these men were highly skilled rock masons and many of them came from the Italian extraction and Scandinavian countries. Earlier days in the early 1900s, Sam Lancaster who was then the highway engineer for the state of Oregon visited in Italy in know ordered to arrange for some of the old stone masons to immigrate to this particular country. My father, as he tells me was one of these men, and

along with other members of his family emigrated to this country in order to work on the Columbia River Highway. At Timberline Lodge, when it was under construction, this same group of of Italians and Scandinavian stone masons came together again to, more or less, work in the trade that they were brought over to this country for. [Ward Gano] The main objective of getting the building completely closed in before winter was accomplished, thanks to a long fall. And then work continued on the interior of the building during the winter under the same conditions of men living at the camp at the foot of the hill and being trucked up to the lodge each morning and back to the camp at night. [Linn Forrest] One of the pleasures I've had in my lifetime certainly has been working with the fine people in the Forest Service and the architectural associates there

and all of these craftsmen and people that went along to make this up. Mrs. Marjorie Smith, who contributed very, very greatly to this project, and who came along after we had gotten it pretty well started, just did a magnificent job. [Marjorie Hoffman Smith] When I first was asked to join, it was because they felt they needed a woman's advice on certain interior details. Which I think they did, and I talked to Mr. Griffith who was the most sympathetic person, and I said why don't we furnish this building. I said we can use Oregon flags and Oregon wool, which were two sick industries at that time and we went to work. Remember, we were dealing with people who were destitute and desperate. The average age of our project worker was 56.

So you see, we were not dealing with youth, and that's why we were so happy to have experienced carpenters, because they were of the old school and they did indeed know their trade and the experience blacksmiths. [repeated] -smiths. Today, there wouldn't be any blacksmiths. We had a few very fine, fine artists - painters, sculptors and so forth, whose work shows up beautifully today, but there weren't many. But we had a great many willing craftsmen. For instance, Mr. Dawson, head blacksmith, was [inaudible, maybe wasn't?] an artist, but he had trained blacksmiths to do the ornamental ironwork. [Orion Dawson] I went to the United States Employment Office, where men of all crafts and skills were listed that were out of work and needing work and there

I picked out the blacksmiths whose qualifications seemed to suit my need the best. I had two of them that were experienced. And one of them was a very skilled man, but the rest of them were what we would call general blacksmiths. Wagon makers, spring makers and heavy hammers, what have you. But they had to learn how to do work for buildings, architectural metalwork in other words. They had learned very, very easily, very quickly and took especially good interest in doing the work. It was something new to some of them. The andirons for the big fireplaces were made of railroad rails, weighing 90 pounds to the yard. They were called 90 pound rails. They were made by a big blacksmith by the name of Blosch. I don't know

what his first name was, and he had a helper, a good husky helper that helped him make them. Sometime in September 1937, I happened to look out the window and a big black sedan rolled up in front of the shop. Out of it alighted several men whom I recognized at once as high officials of the WPA. They came in and told me that President Roosevelt was coming out there and they wanted the lighting fixtures. I couldn't build anything 'til I got some drawings, and then they told me that Fred Baker had been engaged to design the lighting fixture. When they got the design, they wanted to know what I needed, and I told them to fix every available space in this building where men can work. When they got me the men there I had 52 men and NYA boys, National Youth Administration boys on the job, and we got the fixtures out in time for the President's arrival. [Narrator] Right in the

midst of all this hectic work on the lighting fixtures, Max Lorenz, the construction superintendent, said he wanted the dining room gates in place by the time the President arrived. [Orion Dawson] I told him it couldn't be done. We didn't know what to do with him. He said, "What have you done with the ornaments?" I said the ornaments are scattered all over the shop and nobody knows what they want. He says, "Go ahead and put those ornaments in there and get those gates up here." So I called the architect and he sent out Dean Wright, one of his architect, and between Dean Wright and myself, we get a lot of ornaments that had been made. We decided what we wanted to use there and we made enough to complete those motifs and finished the gates and got them hung before the President arrived. All of it was my design because I had workman who made them. [Narrator] Among the blacksmiths in the shop, Ed Frisk was the most experienced in art

metal crafting. He was 68 years old at the time he forged the front door knocker from the design brought to him by Dean Wright, one of the architects. [Orion Dawson] We got the design, both Ed Frisk and I, and studied it. We didn't know how was gonna do this and how was gonna do that. But finally, Ed just said nothing, picked up the designs, and walked out of the shop. Two or three days later he came with a head knocker all made. So what all he did I don't know, but I do know he made one of the finest jobs of sculpture in iron I have ever seen because it was handmade. It was not cast. The fact of the matter is, I considered all of the work that I put in Timberline Lodge as sculptured iron, not wrought iron, or not ornamental iron. It's sculptured iron. [Marjorie Hoffman Smith] Our cabinet makers worked under Ray Neufer, but they were carpenters.

They weren't cabinet makers. So you see, most of the artwork was done by hands, willing hands, and intelligent people, but not by artists. I think you have to realize that when you look at the building, and look at it sympathetically from that point of view. That's why I feel it shouldn't be made into a museum. Because it's a great exhibition of good craftsmanship, but it doesn't go farther. It doesn't get into the museum category. You see, everything we did was made for use. I'll tell you something very interesting about our furniture. We didn't blueprint it. We didn't have time to. We had people on relief and we had to keep them busy. So we would build a piece of furniture. Stand over - I would help stand over it with Newfound, and we would design it. It would be built. After it was built, we would blueprint it. And then make more like it. [Ray Neufer] Well, the general idea was to convey a handmade feeling

To get away from the machine-made furniture. And the feeling of volume and bulk through the wood was the one thing we tried to achieve. The tops were all extra heavy and the chairs were heavier than normal to suggest the feeling of the mountain and the scope of the building and the general felling of the environment. The timbers. If you look at that timber there, you see see how that is carried out. The same general feeling of volume and bulk, Strength and naturalness of the wood itself. You see, The timbers have checked, which is a natural thing from age. It doesn't indicate any weakness particularly, it's just a characteristic of solid wood as it dries out.

The various bolts are all covered with pegs. That's the nature of the construction. This is a carved newel post on the main stairway at the lodge. These posts were made from old telephone poles furnished by the phone company, and carved on the project by the various workers. The models for the figures, in this case some sort of seabird, were made in plaster cast by Florence Thomas and then brought to the project and then the workers converted the figure into the carving you see here. And then they were brought here and fitted into the stairway. These were all made in Portland. [Narrator] The Rams Head table in the dining room reminds Ray Neufer of one of his favorite

stories about one of the wood carvers. [Ray Neufer] He came on the job one day in the shop and he had been celebrating rather gay, and, he says I have an idea. And, he started working on a piece. We didn't know what it was going to be. He had no idea what it was going to be, and when he got through with it, it was a Rams Head. So we decided that it would make a table and it's now in the dining room, and we called it the Rams Head table. Several items originated in that way - just because somebody had an idea and wanted to do something. We got word that the President was coming to dedicate the lodge and on Friday, they told us that he needed a chair with arms. We didn't have a chair with arms. We hadn't made any. So from Friday evening 'til Monday evening, we

succeeded in designing and making this chair and getting it up to the lodge. So, this is the President's chair, which now has a plaque indicating its purpose and origin. One-third of the nation is ill-fed, ill-housed and ill-clothed. That was a statement that Roosevelt was known for during that period. [Marjorie Hoffman Smith] Well, any visitor to Timberline has seen the watercolor studies of the wildflowers - the flora of the region. We took these paintings for the color schemes of our rooms. They were done by a charming old German who had spent his life, his early life in Europe, copying masterpieces in museums for sale commercially. We found him in a most dilapidated situation. He was living in a piano box, and eating beans soaked in cold water. He was so grateful to be on the project. Environment

really dominated our color scheme. We didn't have very much money you know, and so we used sailcloth which was great stuff. And, we used what we had, which made it extremely interesting and rather inventive, because for instance the moon over the mountain curtain was a little triangle that was left over from something else and a little round circle was leftover from something else but it made a nice pattern. We had fun. For instance, we did the fish in the brook. We did the covered wagon. We did the blue Gentian. We did the shooting star. We did the Indian zigzag. Those patterns dominated each room and the hook rug was made to go with it. The fabric in the rugs was interesting. It was

made out of WPA CCC camp blankets that were worn out. CCC camp uniforms that were worn out. So the background was olive drab. Then we took the colored corduroys from the sewing rooms where they were making clothes for destitute families. We had some very nice colors. Putting the two together we were able to get delightful rugs. We took the older women who had been laundresses and janitresses, mostly overweight and not too strong, and put them at hooking rugs. Now the rug hooking project was, to me, one of the most exciting because the workers got so excited about it. And what was interesting was that these women got so excited about the designs, because every day or two there would be a

different design. And they never knew what it was but it was to them a matter of extreme interest. [Narrator] Some of Oregon's finest artists of the 1930s were also selected to make their contributions. Paintings represent the work of C. S. Price, one of Oregon's finest painters. There are paintings by Charles Heaney. There's the work of Darrel Austin. In the dining room, there are two large paintings by Howard Sewall and a linoleum wall decoration by Doug Lynch which speaks of the fun and enjoyed by visitors on the mountain. Virginia Darce's work in glass mosaic decorates the Blue Ox bar. Tom Lehman's tile mosaic brightens the ski lounge.

Wood carvings suggest the wildlife of the natural world outside the lodge. Eric Lemmy depicts the smaller creatures of the woods, and there's the marquetry of Aimee Gorham using a wood mosaic technique. [piano music] [New Speaker] Well in my opinion, one of the greatest things that happened in Timberline, was that everyone grew during the time that it was built, whether it was the craftsmen, whether it was ironworkers, whether it was painters, or whatever it was. And everyone of them, didn't just do their little job, they built.