Postcards from the 1930s recall the whimsical driftwood sculptures that once decorated the grounds at “The Wreckage,” a cottage built from materials found on the beach. The collection was called “The Zoo.”

The century-old log house across the street from Ocean Park’s grade school reminds some of a particular type of “shipwreck.” It looks like it’s made of driftwood.

Technically, it is both.

The Oregon Daily Journal of Sept. 10, 1911, explains, “The Hammond Lumber company’s log raft containing 6,000,000 feet of piling is aground on Peacock Spit at the mouth of the Columbia River and as the Bar is breaking nearly across there is a possibility of it going to pieces. The two San Francisco tugs Dauntless and Hercules are standing by tonight and additional towing power will be sent down tomorrow morning, including the tugs Wallula, Oneonta, revenue cutter Snohomish and the U.S. steamer Capt. James Fornance.”

The possibility of six million board feet of logs going adrift in the waters of the immediate region was breathtaking.

All those logs had been gathered into an enormous bundle and wrapped in tons of heavy chain making a huge cigar-shaped raft. It was tied to tugboats, ready to be towed down-coast to San Francisco or San Diego.

That large raft of logs which did break up on the Columbia Bar in late 1911, with the logs scattering between Tillamook Head and Leadbetter Point, moved Guy Allison and his friends up the beach to gather enough logs to frame that Ocean Park cabin. The crew dug out lumps of hardened concrete from the 1909 wreck of the ship Alice for use as foundation blocks and completed the structure with other salvaged material, including shingles. “The Wreckage” is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. (You can read a delightful story set in that cabin in Walker A. Tompkins’s juvenile mystery novel, “CQ Ghost Ship.”)

Not that simple

Back in 1873, the Astorian repeated a story from the Chicago Times about lumbermen towing logs tied together into big rafts rather than struggling to finesse all those long timbers into the holds of sailing ships to ship them across Lake Michigan. They towed the rafts across the lake, and easily unpacked them. This saved money and time on both ends of the trip. Valuable idea.

West Coast lumbermen set to work trying to figure out how to successfully repeat that experiment between the Columbia River and California.

It wasn’t as easy as it seemed it should be:

• Jan. 7, 1894: “Portions of the big log raft which recently broke up after being towed to sea from Marshfield [in southern Oregon], are encountered by every steamer running on the coast between this port and San Francisco.” The Morning Astorian.

• Oct. 15, 1894: “The big raft that left out Friday last for San Francisco was off the mouth of the [Columbia] River last night, having drifted north from Tillamook Rock. … The tug [Monarch] still has hold of the raft but seems unable to make any headway against the sea. … Pilot Staples arrived in at 1 o’clock on the bark Elginshire, and states that they passed through hundreds of pilings near the lightship about 9 o’clock this morning. …”

• Oct. 19, 1894: “San Francisco, Oct. 15 — Owners of grades are showing keen interest in the fate of the big log raft which is near Columbia River. The Southern Pacific Railway company’s undertaking of rafting lumber to this port by no means pleases the men engaged in the lumber trade, and news that the raft had probably been wrecked caused very little sorrow along the waterfront. …” The Corvallis Gazette-Times, (Corvallis, Oregon).

• Nov. 4, 1894: “… The last two weeks have been full of storms and rain. … Piles from the big log raft have come ashore very fast, and everybody from Seaside to Fort Stevens is making cordwood. …” The Morning Astorian.

• Aug. 9, 1900: “The big log raft whose progress down the coast from the Columbia River has been a constant menace to navigation the past few days was towed yesterday into the West Berkeley mud flats, where it will be broken up. …” Berkeley [Calif.] Daily Gazette.

The ‘cigar rafts’

In the late 1860s in Wisconsin, a 17-year-old immigrant from Norway, Simon Benson, settled in the small timber community of Black River Falls, setting to work earning his living on farms, in the woods, and in sawmills, all the while learning English, and accumulating enough money to open a general store. Later, in 1878, the store which had become his, burned to the ground.

Next, Benson and his young family moved to northwestern Oregon to start over — he’d heard about phenomenal stands of timber in this part of the nation. While he was working for others he bought up failed Lower Columbia River homesteads having good forest land, which he would, years later, harvest.

Historian Fred Lockley, who described Benson as a “deep thinker,” offered as evidence Benson’s replacing of bull teams and skid roads with steam “donkey” locomotives to skid the felled timber more easily and cheaply to the water. “Mr. Benson greatly reduced the cost of production by this change,” wrote Lockley.

By the time Minnesota’s Frederick Weyerhaeuser arrived in Puget Sound to harvest trees, Simon Benson had been innovating and prospering in Oregon’s timber industry for two decades.

One of the innovations for which we remember him today are those lumber rafts, the so-called “cigar rafts.”

Benson wanted to transport logs by water down to his lumber mill in San Diego, where the market for lumber was insatiable and oh-so profitable, but there were no trees to cut.

The problem with wrapping millions of board feet of lumber together in stout chains and attaching a tugboat to one end was the particular way in which the logs had to be interwoven and bound together so ocean waves could not work the whole assembly apart.

Benson worked out his design and then hired local man John A. Fastabend to supervise the construction of the rafts in great big cradles, which looked a bit like the framework of a sailing ship. They assembled the cradle and the raft in the quiet backwater sloughs off the main branch of the Columbia.

When a raft was complete, one side of the cradle was removed and the raft was “kicked out.” Once free-floating, rafts would “flatten out” in the water, further tightening the encircling chains and making the interwoven timbers an even stronger unit. Most rafts hauled approximately 4 to 6 million feet of logs and were typically about 800 to 1000 feet long, 55 feet wide, and 35 feet thick from top to bottom — usually drafting 26 to 28 feet. Holding them together was anywhere from 175 to 250 tons of sturdy log chain.

Another ‘log cabin’

This story of wise use of abundant natural resources, ingenuity, engineering skill, hard work, capitalist success, and philanthropic generosity ends, for me, with the story of another log cabin, one that is no more.

Simon Benson’s gifts to the public included his significant contributions to the construction of the original finely-crafted Columbia River Gorge Highway; the building of the Columbia Gorge Hotel in Hood River; the Benson Hotel on Southwest Broadway in Portland; the donation which made possible Portland Public Schools’ fine Benson High School; and the bronze drinking fountains scattered throughout downtown Portland.

Benson also donated the enormous logs which colonnaded the stunning Forestry Building built for Portland’s very successful 1905 Lewis and Clark Exposition. That fabulous log building was massive and awe-inspiring. Its astonishing interior silenced visitors. At over 200 feet long, 100 feet wide, and 70 feet high, it was one of the few survivors of that business exposition which brought Portland into the 20th century and brought the city to the attention of the rest of the nation.

Designed by Portland architect Ion Lewis of Whidden & Lewis, who also designed Portland’s elegant City Hall, the grand log structure overwhelmed visitors until 1964 when it caught fire and burned throughout a long summer night.

If I remember rightly, something like 40 fire trucks responded to the emergency; neighbors stood in groups, many in tears, watching flames consume what likely could never be built again.

“I loved that old barn,” Aunt Helen said when I bemoaned its loss. I particularly remember an enormous log section resting on a rail car, a single log which was bigger around than the locomotive’s boiler. As it burned from the center outward to the bark, it glowed, producing only a few small flames, but it was clear that its life was at an end.

That was an awful evening.