A turn of the century, hulking piece of machinery that helped quicken the pace of logging in the Pacific Northwest was dedicated to a Amboy museum Saturday, concluding a project nearly two decades in the making to salvage the historical artifact.
“The knowledge of the people involved made it possible. A lot of what it took to complete the project could be seen as a lost art,” said Jim Malinowski, North Clark Historical Museum board of directors president.
The museum is now home to a steam donkey built in the early 1900s. Seattle-based Washington Ironwork Co. manufactured the Rashford Steam Donkey #582. The machinery was last used by the Nick Rashford Logging company.
582 is the second steam donkey on the museum grounds, and it is second only to the museum itself in terms of historical significance, said Malinowski. The museum was formerly a church, completed in 1910.
A steam donkey, or donkey engine, is a steam-powered winch, or logging engine, used during the steam era of logging. They moved — lifted and dragged — logs from stump to logpile, or to load the logs onto skid roads and train cars.
Historians say the donkey engine accelerated timber harvesting throughout the region. Before the advent of the donkey steamer, logs were moved by gravity or the hard-labor of teams of animals like oxen.
The Amboy museum’s newest display was salvaged from a logging site near Cedar Creek and donated to the museum by Leo Bethje, one of the three speakers during Saturday’s dedication.
About two dozen attendants listened to how the steam donkey was discovered and rescued, bits of logging history and what it took to design the exhibit, on the lawn behind the museum. A 40-foot windmill creaked in the background as four men shared their experiences.
Bethje said he found the steam donkey buried in some brush near Cedar Creek and got permission from the landowner, a friend, to recover it. He pledged to give the machinery to the museum in May 2001.
Bethje used a semi-trailer to first haul the machine to his property, and then it ended up in the hands of Mike Rotschy.
The steam donkey was hauled out in pieces and was put back together. Malinowski said the original plan was to make it operable, but once dismantled, it became apparent such an endeavor wasn’t practical.
Volunteers set about building a sled for the steam donkey — literally a humongous sled, which in its prime would have been used to glide the winch across rugged terrain. The U.S. Forest Service was contacted to obtain three old growth trees, each nearly 400 years old, to build the sled.
Many more steps followed: the building of the sled; the preparation of a pad, with three concrete pedestals reinforced with iron bar for the sled and machine to rest on; the transport of the steam donkey to the museum; and the construction of a $15,000 cover to protect all of that aforementioned hard work from the elements.
Rotschy opted to pepper the crowd with stories about the steam era of logging.
“It’s a fairly early version of a steam donkey. Everything that came before didn’t see mass production,” Rotschy said. “It’s a real nice example of a early Washington donkey.”
The donkey steamer could run about half a day with its boiler full with water, Rotschy said. The worker tasked with keeping the water up was pretty busy, he said. Then there was the person running the donkey, pulling all of its levers. There was also the wood crew, working the wild terrain on foot.
A whistle was attached to the top of the machine. With the pull of a string, “it would toot,” Rotschy said. A single whistle could mean stop, or go, which caused confusion and sometimes injury.
The person in charge of those toots was referred to as the whistle punk.
“They were probably just a young punk, a kid,” Rotschy said. “My ma was a whistle punk when I was a toddler.”
Following the dedication, Ruth Ham stood beside a couple of the presenters with a faded, sepia-colored photograph. Three men in the photo stood by a steam donkey, and one man was her father, Gus Stein. She was hoping to find out if it was the same machine.
Unfortunately, there was no way to know for sure.
“He operated a donkey for the Harvey Logging Company in the early 1900s,” Ham said. “My father was a logger, then a farmer, and many other things. He did whatever he had to do.”
