Early logging photos show the taming — and tarnishing — of Washington state’s old-growth forests

Darius Kinsey documented turn of the century tree cutters in all their gritty glory

Horses hauling a spruce log 30 feet in circumference, Washington, 1905. (Darius Kinsey/Library of Congress)

Industrial logging wasn’t always seen purely as wanton environmental destruction. In Washington State, clearcutting was once a necessary step in taming the land for habitation and jump-starting a local economy that would pave the way for development of the Pacific Northwest. Initial logging enterprises in mid-1800s Washington existed to supply timber to California’s Gold Rush and the population growth it precipitated. But when the Northern Pacific railroad opened a direct rail link over the Cascades to Tacoma in 1887, and with Wisconsin and Minnesota already grossly depleted by deforestation, Washington and the Pacific Northwest quickly assumed the role of primary timber supplier to the nation, ensuring the region’s rapid development as it entered the 20th century.

In the broad fervor of industry’s westward expansion, ancillary enterprises arose. Darius Kinsey, who left his home in Missouri at the age of 20, found his niche in Washington’s burgeoning economy as the preeminent photographer of logging industry and culture. A diminutive man by all accounts, Kinsey had started out in the hotel and mercantile business upon arriving in Washington in 1889. But photography piqued the young man’s interest, and soon he was lugging a massive glass-plate view camera to remote logging camps, making portraits of men who, like him, had come west to seek their fortune. Such settlements at the time were notorious for their lawlessness and vice — unregulated prospecting fostered a libertine spirit. Sustainability was not part of the vocabulary.

On the spring boards and in the undercut — Washington bolt cutter and daughters, circa 1905. (Darius Kinsey/Library of Congress)

But things were beginning to change. By 1905, under the tenure of naturalist president Teddy Roosevelt, 7.4 million acres of Washington forest were under federal protection. Between 1900 and 1910, new laws were put in place to curb unregulated clearcutting and establish a state forest commission and burn-permit system. In 1907, the University of Washington opened its School of Forestry to nurture stewardship over the state’s natural resources. Over time, total deforestation tactics would be replaced by selective harvesting of mature trees. Though this too would prove problematic in later years.

As a photographer, Kinsey was in the right place at the right time to witness the massive changes taking place in the timber industry. Under his watch, logging was shifting from itinerant crews of prospectors to organized and well funded extensions of big business. We see this in the scale of his images — the locomotives perched precariously on quickly-erected wooden trestles, lines of rail cars loaded with logs the size of small houses, desolate expanses of forest reduced to stumps, and the occasional women and children homesteaders, a sign that wayward lumberjacks were finally beginning to put down roots. One of the main difficulties for harvesting the unruly thicket of Washington’s old-growth forests had been removing felled trees from remote terrain. Trains, and particularly the introduction of the steam donkey engine in the 1880s, helped streamline the process of harvesting ancient cedar, fir, and other tree species. But alongside those large-scale technological developments, and the humbler axes, cross-cut saws, and springboards used by on-the-ground tree cutters, Kinsey’s photographs also highlight the tenacious humanity of laboring souls forging a path toward a new future and a new nation.

Kinsey was still documenting the progression and cultural impact of logging from his Seattle home in 1940 when, at the age of 70, he suffered several broken ribs after falling off a tree stump. The injury ended his career and he died five years later.

Logging Train and Donkeys in the Wonderful Woods of Washington, 1908. (Darius Kinsey/Getty Open Content Program)

Three men in devastated forest. Logging in the Cascade Mountains, near Seattle, 1906. (Darius Kinsey/Library of Congress)

Spruce, circa 1906. (Darius Kinsey/Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University via Wikimedia)

(left) Residence of an Early Settler in Washington, 1901. | (right) Washington logging train going down a mountain with logs from a twelve foot fir, 1908. (Darius Kinsey/Library of Congress + Getty Open Content Program)

Lumbering operations in the Cascade Mountains, Washington, 1906. (Darius Kinsey/Library of Congress)

(left) A twelve-foot fir tree and its destroyer, circa 1901. | (right) Logging trestle in Cascade Mountains—height 107 feet to top of rails, 1922. (Darius Kinsey/Library of Congress)

Men with Steam-powered Lumber Derrick, circa 1927. (Darius Kinsey/Getty Open Content Program)

Falling Redwood, Humboldt County, California, 1906. (Darius Kinsey/Getty Open Content Program)

Felling Cedar Tree Thirty Miles East of Seattle, 76 feet in Circumference, 18 in From Ground, 1906. (Darius Kinsey/Getty Open Content Program)

20-foot high fir stump containing 1200 feet of lumber, 1906. (Darius Kinsey/Library of Congress)

Fish trap piles, length 120 ft. circa 1899. (Darius Kinsey/Library of Congress)

(left) Log cabin in the forests of Puget Sound, 1906. | (right) Cedar Stump Cemetery — Monuments of a Red Cedar Forest in Washington, circa 1910–1945. (Darius Kinsey/Library of Congress + Getty Open Content Program)

Loggers balancing on a spar, 1924. (Darius Kinsey/MPI/Getty Images)

Pacific Highway through a Washington red cedar stump, 20 feet in diameter, 1920. (Darius Kinsey/Library of Congress)

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