Portland lost world’s biggest log cabin in 1964 fire

Good morning, Oregon. I'm Finn J.D. John F.J. at OffbeatOrgan.com, and this is the Daily

Offbeat Oregon History Podcast. Thanks for tuning in, and I hope you enjoy it.

This story was first published on June 17th of 2012 under the headline,

P-Town Lost World's Biggest Log Cabin in a 1964 fire. Here we go. When the Sun

came up on the morning of August 17th, 1964, Oregon was home of the world's

largest log cabin. When the Sun went down that evening, it wasn't, and firefighters

were still battling a blaze that sent flames 10 stories into the air and rained

burning embers the size of apples down on neighboring houses roofs. It was the

granddaddy of all fires in this historic area of Portland, local photographer and

graphic designer Grant Keltner later wrote,

I don't think I'll ever see anything like it again. The cabin was one of the

last two surviving buildings from the 1905 Lewis and Clark Exposition in

Portland, and it sat across the road from Montgomery Park in the Northwest

section of town. It was an enormous structure measuring 206 by 102 feet, just shy

of half an acre, a million-board feet of lumber went into it. By the way, another

building that was part of the Expo, the National Cash Register Company

Exhibition Building, survives to this day. It now houses the St. John's Theatre

and Pub, part of the Minimums Group, back to our story. Portland Timber magnates

Simon Benson, a fella who installed the famous Benson bubbler drinking

fountains in downtown Portland, supplied most of the logs for the structure,

and they were hand-picked old-growth monsters from Columbia County. There

was a great colon aid down the middle of the building made of 52 unpeeled six-foot

thick tree trunks, hand-matched like a string of pearls. They'd had to be

handled specially when they were cut and hauled to preserve their bark. After

the 1905 Exposition, the building was purchased by the City of Portland, which

for many years led it decline in decay. It was nearly lost to fire several times

when embers fell on the roof, either from nearby building fires or wood stove

embers, but quick responses by the fire department kept it going. In the 1940s,

there was talk of actually demolishing the building, which by then had turned

into a safety hazard. The balconies had been built with whole logs, which

had warped, making them dangerous. The whole building was like a banquet hall for

wood-destroying organisms like bark beetles and termites. Finally, in the

1950s, the Chamber of Commerce took up a collection to restore the place.

By this time people were starting to realize it was completely irreplaceable.

Old-growth timber like what had gone into its construction could still be

found, but it was deeper in the forest and less uniform. Finding 52 matching

trees would be prohibitively expensive if not impossible to do, and since the

logs would have to be trucked to the site rather than just floated up the river,

log-handling systems would have to be engineered to prevent the bark from being

scarred by logging equipment. By the time of the state's centennial

celebration in 1959, the building was mostly restored to its former glory.

It now boasted a priceless collection of logging and lumbering exhibits, both antique and

modern, according to an Oregonian report. Also on display was another bit of history.

The first sheet of commercially-produced Douglas Ferpli would ever made, a product of the

Watson family's Portland Manufacturing Company, produced in 1904. All of it went up in flames

on what was surely the biggest and most spectacular single-building structure fire in Portland

history, and until the 1992 burning of the blimp hanger until a mook in Oregon history as well.

On August 17, 1964, the forestry building's caretaker locked up for the night at around 5.30 pm.

Within 45 minutes, neighbors were noticing that something was wrong. Specifically,

the place was on fire, and when the fire crews arrived around 6.15, it was clear that nothing

short of direct divine intervention was going to put it out. There was never a hope of saving

the building, the Oregonian reported the next day. Nothing was saved from the inside.

It turned out that the fire had been started by some bad vintage 195 electrical wiring.

Had it broken out an hour earlier, the caretaker might have seen it in time to raise the alarm

and possibly save the building, but that's not what happened. The fire rapidly grew to spectacular

proportions and people flocked to the scene from all over Portland. Grant Kelton was a boy at the

time living about four blocks from the building. The flames were almost 10 stories high. The fire

eliminated the sky from miles, though the neighborhood was an orange glow, he wrote on his website.

The windows on the entire south side of the Montgomery Park building were blown out.

The heat was so intense that the windows were popping out. Glass was falling down into the streets

below. Ashes, the size of large snowflakes fell to the ground within a mile of the structure.

It was surreal, an amazing sight. Some of the spectators, the Oregonian reported were in tears.

Afterward, the city pulled itself together as best it could. Citizens and civic leaders

got together with timber industry leaders to create the Western Forestry Institute to fill the void.

The new institute soon had a new building roughly the same size as the old one in Washington Park.

Generations of Northwest Oregon's school children remember it from field trips to the zoo,

Amzean Forestry Center. Before Amze, the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry moved to its present

location. So the mission of the forestry building lives on, but as for the building itself,

it was an artifact of a time that is gone and is not coming back. The great heyday of old

growth logging in Oregon. Key sources in this story have included works by Mark Moore at pdxorigan.com,

Grant Keltner at worldforestry.org, and James Andrew Long, author of Oregon Firsts Past and

Present, a book published in 1994.

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