The Washington Excelsior and Manufacturing Company: A Piece of Edmonds' Industrial Past

Shingle mills were king during . The waterfront was dotted with smokestacks, the sweet scent of cedar was everywhere and the "whoosh-whoosh" sound of the shake-cutting machines filled the air.

But shingles weren't the only industry on the waterfront.

The Washington Excelsior and Manufacturing Company mill turned out a very different product: excelsior.

No, this product is not related to the motto of the State of New York (Excelsior!), the famous Excelsior Diamond or the Excelsior-class starships of Star Trek.

Rather it is a soft, compressible, cushioning, absorbant mass of long wood shavings with a host of industrial and other applications. For many years it was the material of choice for packing delicate articles for shipping, until being replaced by styrofoam and bubble wrap.

But excelsior is much more than a packing material. Additional applications included stuffing for plush toys like teddy bears, as well as real animals in taxidermy. Dyed green, it made an annual appearance as the traditional "grass" in Easter baskets until being replaced by plastic grass.

Excelsior is still used as the filling material for cooling pads in home swamp coolers, the evaporative cooling systems common in desert southwest residences. Other present-day applications include mats and blankets for erosion control, garden mulch, animal bedding and the substrate for culturing fruit flies.

Banded into bale form, excelsior is also used in archery backstops. If protected from the elements, an excelsior archery backstop can last for many years. And it's renewable!

If sections of it wear down because of repeated targeting, the bale can be soaked liberally since it then expands and holds water, just like a dry sponge.

The Washington Excelsior and Manufacturing Company began operating on the Edmonds waterfront in the early years of the 20th century. It utilized wood from the hemlocks and douglas firs harvested from the Edmonds Bowl and other nearby areas. Excelsior manufacture did not require high-quality timber, leaving the prized western red cedar and straight fir logs to be converted to shakes and lumber by neighboring mills.

Demand for the product grew rapidly in the early years of the century, and in October 1909 the Washington Excelsior and Manufacturing Company was sold to the Western Veneer and Box Company. A year later the firm had 30 employees and orders booked out for five months operation.

It was among the first of Edmonds' mills to convert to electricity, replacing the complicated (and dangerous) pulley and belt systems with individual electric motors to power the mill machinery. Steam boilers were still required to run the generators, however, and fires burned 24 hours a day, sometimes for months at a time. The fires occasionally escaped into the mill itself. Badly destroyed by fire in April 1914, the mill was rebuilt and back in operation by June.

In subsequent years, excelsior was replaced in many applications by a variety of new materials and demand fell off. This, combined with the increasing shortage of raw materials as Edmonds was logged off, made the operation less profitable. Like the neighboring shingle mills, the Washington Excelsior and Manufacturing Company cut its hours of operation, reduced its workforce and finally closed its doors.

Today the site of the mill is incorporated into the Edmonds Marina. Stretching from the fishing pier south to approximately the site of the new Edmonds Yacht Club building, not a trace is left of what was once a major employer and a colorful piece of Edmonds industrial heritage.