JeffCo First Friday Lecture all about Olympic Peninsula logging

Published 4:19 pm Wednesday, May 27, 2015

The Jefferson County Historical Society’s First Friday Lecture on June 5 features Jack Zaccardo with the “History of Olympic Peninsula Logging.”

The talk begins at 7 p.m. in the historic Port Townsend City Council Chamber. Admission is by donation which supports the society’s programs.

Zaccardo has lectured on logging history for more than 45 years. He is a retired State of Washington Department of Natural Resources forester and is the fourth generation of his family to work in the timber industry. Jack’s great grandfather, an Italian shoemaker, immigrated to the Olympic Peninsula where he found work in the logging industry. His grandfather lived on the Blyn homestead and was a logger, mill owner and forest fire warden. His father was a logger and mill worker who met his mother when she worked in a logging camp cookhouse.

Zaccardo is the past chairman of the Olympic Logging Conference and past director of the Pacific Logging Congress. He utilizes his maternal grandfather Bert Kellog’s collection of slides and negatives to show how logging has evolved from 1880 to the 1930s. He explains the transition from Native American techniques to oxen and horse yarding, to yarding with steam.

Other photos of interest illustrate transporting the logs from the woods to the mill with early trucks and railroad as well as images of early workers and settlers.

For more information, call 385-1003.