Copalis – Group Eating

Hoquiam amateur photographer Joe Stearns simply, yet aptly, titled a pair of his glass plate negatives “Copalis – Group Eating & Sleeping.” Stearns and his friends regularly picnicked near Copalis as they owned cabins at Pacific Beach in the 1900s and 1910s. Notably, the older bearded man at right-foreground is George Emerson, the man widely regarded as the “father” of Hoquiam. The well-groomed man just left of center resting his hand on the wooden Price Baking Powder crate is almost certainly Robert Polson.

Watermelon, Anyone?

Lunch breaks at Harbor mills were always a treasured time of each day. Here Eureka Lumber & Shingle Company personnel sit on a two-rail fence along the Chehalis River eating watermelon circa 1920. The Eureka was a Polson-owned sawmill located at the foot of Ontario Street in Hoquiam.

German Bakery

Frank Binder and William Siese opened Aberdeen’s German Bakery in 1910 at 109 West Heron. The bakery provided Harborites with a taste of Germany for 45 years, although it underwent several name changes prior to closing in 1955. In 1924 it was renamed Grays Harbor Bakery and then, in 1949, Siese’s Bakery.

From the forested slopes of the lower Columbia River more than a century ago emerged a dynamic breed of boss loggers with ambition and savvy that set them apart from the other Bunyanesque men of their generation. They grew with the region and became Oregon’s lumbering elite, with notables like Johnny Yeon and Simon Benson. Counted among this group were the four Brix brothers, Asmus, Albert, Peter John (P.J.), and Anton. Between them, their logging and lumbering activities would stretch from Puget Sound to Coos Bay and a fleet of tugs and barges would carry Brix interests from Idaho to Alaska.

In 1879, Asmus became the first of the brothers to arrive in America from their native Germany. Two years later the rest of the family—Peter F. and Maria Brix and their six younger children—joined Asmus after enduring a harrowing trip across the continent. The family settled in the Grays River valley, in the southwestern corner of the Washington Territory, living for a time in a barn and eating from the small garden that Asmus had had the foresight to plant. Peter and his sons worked cutting trees and clearing land. This was the younger boys’ first practical experience with logging. In 1888, Peter and Maria lost their 5 year-old son Christoph to childhood disease. Seven years later another son, Herman, died as the result of a fall from a barn roof. He was 17.

In 1884, Asmus and Albert, then 20 and 18, formed Brix Brothers Logging Company. For nearly a decade the brothers snaked giant logs out of the woods using first teams of oxen, and after 1892, steam-powered donkey engines. As their siblings came of age they labored alongside their older brothers, including their sister, Margaretha, who cooked for the growing number of loggers living in the Brix camp. In 1896 the four brothers incorporated Grays Bay Logging Company and entered the realm of railroad logging. The Brix brothers’ fortunes began to grow and their interests spread.

Albert Brix moved to Astoria with his wife in the 1890s. He worked as the log seller for the brothers’ firm and for a time served as president Columbia River Loggers’ Association. In 1909, Albert, P.J., and Sven Lindburg purchased the sawmill at Knappton, located on the north bank of the Columbia River opposite Astoria. Later he managed a sawmill in Coos Bay before settling in Portland to oversee his wholesale lumber business. Albert suffered a fatal heart attack in 1921, when he was 55.

By 1895, Asmus and his wife, Christine, had taken up residence in Astoria as well. He became a stockholder in an Astoria sawmill and entered local politics. In 1906, he sold his stock in Grays Bay Logging Company to P.J. and enjoyed an extended European tour with his wife, including a trip to his former home. Asmus later retired to his farm near Clatskanie and in 1924 passed away at age 60.

Anton, the youngest of the surviving Brix brothers, was in charge of Grays Bay’s railroad construction. In 1904 he survived a runaway train wreck that took the life of one of his young employees and left him with a permanent limp. Anton moved his family to Tacoma and enrolled in a theological studies program. He later returned to logging, with operations around south Puget Sound, before coming back to the lower Columbia to log with his oldest son, Walter, in the 1930s. Another of Anton’s sons, Herman, better known by the stage name Bruce Bennett, was a standout collegiate athlete who later portrayed Tarzan in a number of motion pictures. In 1944, Anton, 67, succumbed to heart failure.

P.J. Brix had the most far-reaching and fruitful business interests of the brothers. In addition to the Grays Bay operation, P.J. opened logging camps along both banks of the lower Columbia. In 1925, he helped form K-P Timber Company and purchased the Kerry Line, northwest Oregon’s largest logging railroad network that tapped the dense timber stands of the Nehalem River valley. His interest ran in sawmills and shipyards as well. In 1918, he became president of Wilson Shipbuilding Company of Astoria, which turned out five large steamships before the end of the First World War. That same year P.J. moved to the Laurel hurst district of Portland where he remained active in the management of his holdings for the next 3 decades.

Upon P.J.’s death in 1948, at age 78, his son John took over the family’s longest-lived enterprise, the Knappton Towboat Company. The company evolved naturally out of the Knappton sawmill operation, when around 1910, P.J. purchased several small tug boats to handle log rafts and help moor seagoing lumber ships. During this period the tidal portion of the Columbia River was a veritable highway for logs with great rafts of Douglas fir and spruce being towed from remote log dumps to the many mills between Portland and the Pacific. Soon Knappton towboats, with their gray hulls, white houses, and trademark black “K” on the smokestacks were plying the waters all along the lower river.

John Brix experienced a heart attack in 1952, which limited him to a part-time work schedule as the company’s head. In 1960, after John passed away, his son Peter took control of the towboat firm and began an era of phenomenal growth. By the 1970s, Knapptontugs were barging oil and grain the length of the Columbia River, as well as offering ocean-going tug service to remote reaches of Alaska. In 1982, the twin-screw tug PJ Brix was launched and joined the fleet of 80 tugs and barges operated by the company. Peter Brix sold the Knappton Corporation in the 1990s, but continues to be involved in the tug and barge industry, carrying on a family tradition that has spanned nearly a century.

While emptying drawers and cabinets preparatory to a major remodeling, I found an unusual bottle in one of my husband’s miscellaneous piles. The blue bottle was two inches long, with slender white striping along the sides. At one end it curled back upon itself, like a chambered nautilus. The other end had an opening which must have had a stopper or cork in it at one time. A curl of clear glass defined the upper edge. Many years ago my husband had found it on the beach at Bayview on the lower Columbia River, site of a 19th century salmon cannery. At first he thought it was just a bit of broken cobalt glass, but when he picked it up, he realized it was a bottle.

But what kind of bottle was deliberately made to not stand upright? I guessed it might be a perfume bottle, but it seemed an odd shape for such a purpose. In the days before the Antiques Roadshow and e-Bay there was no easy way to find out. We took it with us to antique shops and shows, and glass collector displays. We pored through books in the local library. Finally, at a large antique show in Portland, Oregon, we found a dealer who identified it.

“It’s Nailsea glass,” she said, “and it’s a Victorian tear vial.”

We weren’t much further ahead on either count. But further research led us to discover that Nailsea glass was made in England in the mid 19th century, and was known for the striping that was twisted into the molten glass while being blown. Cobalt blue was a popular color. And a tear vial? Known at one time as a “lachrimatory,” the tear bottle dates from antiquity. In Victorian times they became especially popular, as part of the elaborate mourning customs of the era. The bottles were fitted with special stoppers, that allowed the collected tears to evaporate over a period of time. When the bottle was empty, the mourning period was over. They were also used to hold tears for sprinkling on love letters, to indicate to the loved one how much they were missed. I sighed over this romantic idea, put the glass bottle back in one of several drawers of miscellaneous items and forgot about it.

Some years later I came across a passage about the life of Celia Hume, wife of salmon canner Robert Hume. Together with her husband, Celia Hume came to live at the Bayview Cannery just below Skamokawa, Washington, on the Columbia River, in the early 1870s. Robert Hume had struggled for several years to amass the capital needed to establish his cannery. The early days were filled with difficulties, including a spring freshet that wiped out some of his construction work, and the constant worry about getting the huge amount of labor done in the short season available to put up a pack of canned salmon in those pioneering days. But worse was to come. In Robert Hume’s own words:

“At this time our baby girl was taken sick and we sent for an old German doctor who lived at Cathlamet, but think he gave her such strong medicine that it caused her death. She was a beautiful child, and it nearly broke her mother’s heart when we lost her. We buried her in a little nook near the house, and many times I would awaken at midnight and find that my wife was missing from my side, would go to the little nook and find her stretched upon this grave. She grieved so much that [I] believe she implanted the seeds of death into her constitution. I was obliged to have the child disinterred and taken to Portland, to the Lone Fir cemetery, on the west side, where she now lies.”

Shortly thereafter the Humes had a baby boy, but in 1877 he also died. Robert Hume wrote:

“During the summer we lost our little boy, four and one-half years old, who had come to heal the wounds of our early loss. This second bereavement was too much for my wife to endure, and she went into a decline and soon followed her children to the Lone Fir cemetery.”

The distancing from his own emotions is evident in this passage, “her children” being the most obvious phrase.

Robert Hume left Bayview in 1877 and moved to San Francisco for a while. Despite his successful business ventures, he sold his Bayview and Astoria property, saying “I felt I had gotten to the end of life and cared little what became of me.” Although devastated by the loss of his little boy and his wife, he eventually remarried, and entered the canning business again, this time on the Rogue River in Gold Beach, Oregon.

Was the bottle Celia Hume’s? My romantic notions of a woman in a Victorian parlor writing letters to a fiancé or to friends far distant, sprinkled with her tears, vanished. Was it Robert Hume’s? Grief so deep that it caused him to leave the Columbia River entirely despite his early success makes the tear vial seem like a paltry thing.

The Bayview Cannery is no more, only a few pilings near a rocky beach. I sometimes look at the blue bottle, and see it as a reminder of pioneer days, of the many lonely women from those early times who lost children and their own lives trying to establish homes and families in the Pacific Northwest. I also think of it as a grave marker on that rocky beach at Bayview, a symbol of sorrow left behind. The bottle is empty now. The blue glass is surprisingly soft to the touch, as if the beach has worn and smoothed it in the century that passed until its rediscovery.