This photo shows pots and pans strewn about the homestead site.
There’s no telling what someone might find on our millions of acres of timberlands. From vital wildlife habitats to historic and culturally significant sites, there’s a little of everything. We’ve been cataloging and protecting these areas for decades, and we’re still making discoveries.
Jason Johnson, one of our contract timber cruisers, made one such discovery this spring. During a routine timber evaluation on our Pe Ell tree farm in Washington, he found the remnants of a homestead. It was surrounded and shrouded by Douglas-fir trees that had grown unusually large due to the protective buffer provided by a nearby Riparian Management Zone.
Old crosscut saw is embedded into a large Douglas-fir. The overgrowth around the saw suggests it’s been there for decades, if not longer.
FOLLOWING PROTOCOL TO SHARE FINDINGS
Jason took a closer look. There was a crosscut saw stuck in one of the trees. On the ground, parts of a stove, pots and pans, and pieces of glass bottles were scattered about near the remains of a cabin.
Following standard procedure, Jason took care not to disturb the area, documented his findings on the cruise map and alerted our Josh Meek, the area’s inventory forester. Josh reached out to several people across Western Timberlands, part of our protocol for assessing historically and culturally significant sites.
One was Bob Bolander, Pe Ell harvest planner, who helps decide the next steps when our teams encounter something of interest.
“We’re all trained and advised to stay alert for anything unusual,” Bob says. “We often have a legal duty — and always an ethical responsibility — to safeguard heritage sites and alert the appropriate parties.”
But first, we needed to gather more information.
Some of the cut marks in this Douglas-fir look like a cat’s whiskers. These “cat-faced” marks suggest an ax-hewn surface and hint at the site’s age.
TAKING A CAREFUL CLOSER LOOK
Trevor Kaech, roads manager, was one of the people Josh emailed about the site’s discovery. Trevor has extensive knowledge of local history and was excited to explore the area.
A few days later, as Trevor moved through the thick vegetation, the massive Douglas-fir trees with six- and seven-foot-diameter trunks proved the site’s age — and provided a sense of how long it had sat undisturbed.
The overgrowth around the crosscut saw indicated the site was about a century old, as did the thick glass bottles and their seams, which suggested they were made before mass production by machines.
“I have an innate interest in things that are old, including the area’s history,” says Trevor, who grew up in the area. “Pe Ell is a timber town, and my family has worked in the industry for at least three generations.”
The seams of a bottle fragment, which stop before the lip, suggest it was made in the early 20th century, before mass-machine production.
MAKING A CONNECTION TO AN EARLY HOMESTEADER
That interest, along with his Weyerhaeuser training, guided Trevor’s next steps. He alerted the Pe Ell team to the site’s potential cultural and historical significance. Back in the office, Trevor and the team continued their research, including reviewing old maps from the U.S. General Land Office. This digging ultimately connected the site to an early 1910 homesteader named James Donahue.
Although a definitive connection hasn’t been established, a James Donahue (or Donahoe, according to some reports) was among Pe Ell’s first elected officials in 1906. Additionally, a James Donahue from Pe Ell submitted a patent to the U.S. Patent Office in 1913 for an “undercut saw guide.”
The Pe Ell team sent their findings to Dave Smith, Washington inventory and planning manager, who serves as Timberlands’ primary contact with the state on these matters.
As a result, the site has been proposed for inclusion on the Washington State Heritage Register and is now listed on our Forest Management mapping system. The team also expanded the nearby riparian buffer to surround the site and its older Douglas-firs.
While respecting historically and culturally significant sites is part of our sustainability value and a responsibility we take seriously, our efforts to preserve the Donahue homestead especially resonated with Trevor. With help from local historians and others, he’s hopeful we’ll eventually uncover more about James Donahue and the homestead site.
“We manage a large landscape,” he says. “Setting aside a couple of acres of trees and an old homestead site near a stream buffer is a small ask. It’s easy to protect and won’t hinder the harvests of the surrounding areas. It just feels right and is a positive all the way around.”
