Spruce Production Division

Were they soldiers or loggers? Were they both?

In November of 1917, in response to an ever-increasing demand for the Sitka spruce growing in the Pacific Northwest and a production slow-down due to a labor dispute, the U.S. Army Signal Corps established the Spruce Production Division, effectively sending soldiers into the forests.

What’s the story behind this? Fortunately, Gerald W. Williams himself wrote a fine history in 1999 for the journal Forest History Today entitled “The Spruce Production Division”.

In the summer of 1917, there was a major dispute between the logging, lumber, and sawmill divisions of the Industrial Workers of the World, the American Federation of Labor, and the lumber companies. This was an ill-timed strike from the point of view of the military because they really needed the spruce wood that was plentiful in the Pacific Northwest for building planes (Douglas-fir was also good for ships, and we have a lot of that as well).

Witnessing the impact the strike was having on plane production, the military stepped in to investigate how they could combat the lag in lumber production. First they appointed former Army Captain Brice Disque to a secret surveillance mission to study the labor unrest in the region; he concluded that the conflict wasn’t likely to resolve itself soon and recommended that an army of soldiers be placed in the woods with the expressed purpose of “building railroads, cutting trees, and sawing the logs into lumber.” On November 6th, the newly reinstated Lt. Colonel Disque was given command of the Spruce Production Division, a military unit dedicated to the production of spruce lumber for planes and Douglas-fir lumber for ships. And it was quite a unit, with nearly 29,000 soldiers involved at its peak in 1918! He also proposed placing the men in lumber camps throughout the region, which would have the added benefit of “reducing the amount of union sabotage and violence, protecting the industrial base, protecting the forests from fire, filling the supply gaps of lumber workers who had gone off to war, and increasing production of spruce to pre-1917 levels.”

However, as you can imagine, neither the loggers nor the companies were fond of this plan; lucky for the Army, apparently Colonel Disque was quite savvy at negotiating. He convinced both sides that it was actually a matter of patriotism to support the soldiers and increase wood production. Interestingly, in the midst of all of this logging, the Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumberman (known as the 4Ls), a unique, "patriotic," government labor union (comprised of civilians, military, and management) was formed—and everyone “peacefully” battled the rugged topography of our region and the famous NW rain.

Needless to say, these were really big old-growth trees they were cutting down, and they needed to figure out an efficient means for both logging and transporting them out of the forests. Initially, they came up with creative methods to split the trees into more manageable pieces (one was the riving process) and they used motorized vehicles on a grand scale. Still, it was taking more time than they had, so they decided to build railroads to transport whole logs; of course, these railroads were intended to be temporary structures! “In some instances, to minimize cost and construction time, sections of railroad were built entirely on logs, piles, or stringers supported by log cribbing” (there are some excellent pictures in the John Fletcher Ford set we'll be releasing into Flickr Commons on April 1st).

In the meantime, there were claims that the forests on the Olympic Peninsula had "one of the greatest stands of virgin timber" in the US, and they had to get access to it! Unfortunately, that wasn’t easy because it was in quite an inaccessible spot... This wasn’t a problem with the monetary and man-power resources of the government. They set out to build a 175 mile rail system, known as Spruce Railroad No. 1, and 2 saw mills to access the area (which covered 300 sq. mi. and had nearly 6 billion board feet of standing timber) and start moving lumber out by November 1919. The projected timeline was 2 years, but they managed to complete it in just 6 months: nothing short of astonishing. (Un)Fortunately, as we all know, the war ended. This meant that they didn't need to keep building planes, which meant they didn’t need to keep harvesting lumber from the region, which meant that work immediately stopped for the Spruce Production Division, which meant that not a single tree was ever transported on the rails... Not a well-liked conclusion to an expensive project in the eyes of taxpayers!

Its lifespan was short, but the overall contribution of the unit was positive. As Williams says, “Confronted with some of the most rugged country in the Pacific Northwest, trees of immense proportions, choking vegetation, relentless rains, and a time schedule few believed could be met, the Spruce Production Division succeeded in providing millions of board feet of needed wood for the war effort.”