Cedar And Smokestacks: Looking Back At Edmonds’ Shingle Industry

In the late 1800s, the old growth forests of Edmonds were a resource waiting to be tapped.

The original forest was dominated by Western Redcedar, Western Hemlock and Douglas Fir. While hemlock and fir made fine lumber, cedar was the premier resource. Cedar is soft, aromatic and straight-grained. It splits cleanly into shakes, a staple building material both then and now. The huge old growth cedars in the Edmonds bowl caught the eye of George Brackett and other early pioneers who saw tremendous opportunity in exploiting these natural resources.

Brackett established at the foot of Bell Street in 1889, and others soon followed. But it was cedar shakes, not lumber, that became Edmonds number one product. By the early twentieth century, Edmonds had become a thriving mill town, and the shingle industry dwarfed all others.  By 1910, the and the smell of fresh-cut cedar and woodsmoke filled the air. Many prominent Edmonds citizens owned shingle mills, including and the , and the mills provided hundreds of wage-earner jobs.

Originally, workers turned cedar bolts into shakes by spliting them by hand with a tool called a froe, but the process soon became industrialized. The new shingle machines, capable of producing hundreds of shakes each hour, consisted of a circular saw blade and a shuttle mechanism. The shuttle held a bolt of cedar and passed it back and forth across the saw blade, shaving off a shake with each pass.

The early mills were entirely powered by steam. Each mill maintained boilers, steam engines, and the mechanical equipment necessary to drive all plant equipment from shingle machines to conveyor belts to loading cranes. The equipment was connected to reciprocating steam engines by a complicated system of belts, pulleys and flywheels.

Wood-burning fires fueled by mill ends and other scrap provided heat for the steam boilers and the drying kilns. They burned day and night, as it would be impractical to start them cold each morning.  In later years, some mills converted to electricity, substituting electric motors for the complicated belt and pulley systems. But they still needed steam to drive the electric generators and heat to dry the fresh shakes, and the row of stacks along the waterfront continued to spew smoke and ash into the air.

The mills were noisy, dangerous places to work, and it was not uncommon for workers to lose fingers, hands or worse. In one famous accident, a log slipped into the Quality Mill’s spinning saw blade, causing the blade to fly to pieces. Former Edmonds Mayor Larry Naughton recalls as a 12-year old boy seeing a piece of the blade fly through the heavy wooden wall of the mill and land in his yard. Another piece split the mill’s roof beams, narrowly missing three workers.  A third piece was never found. (For a glimpse of what it might have been like to work in an Edmonds shingle mill, view this You Tube video of an operating antique mill using traditional steam-driven equipment).

By the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Edmonds shingle mills ran day and night, supplying markets up and down the west coast. Boats were loaded daily and transported millions of shingles each month to Alaska, California, and points in between. The busy shingle industry helped insulate Edmonds from the Great Depression, and in July 1933, the Quality Mill, on the site of the present-day senior center, added 23 jobs to its payroll.

World War II diverted much of the nation’s resources to the war effort. Construction and demand for building materials slowed. By 1942, only two Edmonds shingle mills remained in operation: Quality and Oakland (located just north of the ferry terminal). The next year, Quality acquired Oakland, and became the last remnant of a once-thriving industry.

The years following the war saw increased diversification in the local economy. Edmonds was fast moving from its industrial roots to a mixed residential and business community, and was no longer dependent on the shingle industry. With cedar no longer in rich abundance and new building materials taking the place of shakes, the shingle industry was caught between a shortage of raw material and a decreased demand for its product.

On June 1, 1951, the Quality Mill, the last vestige of Edmonds’ industrial past, shut down its boilers for the last time and closed for good.