Forestry museum at Willingdon Beach opens for summer

For more than five years, the Forestry Museum located in the long, wooden building at Willingdon Beach, had been closed to the public. Folks walking by have most likely wondered why, and when or would the facility museum open its doors again?

Since mid-June of this year, Forestry Museum coordinators Sharon Taylor and Paul Higgins have finally been welcoming the public back inside the building, which houses the long history of logging in this community inside its walls.

"It's great, because people love it," said Taylor, who has worked with qathet Museum and Archives Society and the Forestry Museum for decades. "They almost feel like it speaks to them and they always have interesting questions."

The museum society now owns and operates the Forestry Museum and has consolidated the indoor assets with its collection. The facility is open to the public Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays from noon until 4 pm.

"Some of the biggest feedback we get are from those who have lived here for years, and all this time they didn't know this existed," said Higgins. "We also get a lot of feedback from people who were either children of loggers or grandchildren of loggers."

Both Taylor and Higgins said the reopening took years of renovation, revamping and reorganizing of the museum space and items within it.

"We had one guy who was in his 80s, and when he was 12, he started working in forestry," said Taylor. “He remembers using the big handsaws."

The Forestry Museum was founded in the early 1980s by a group of local people, including Charlie and Gerri Parsons, Jack McCuish, Bill Finn, Andy Culos, Bill Tuba and Ken Gordon. The building itself is very long in shape and before the 1970s was the Willingdon Beach public bathhouse.

Walking into the entranceway of the museum, visitors can see a collection of archival photographs and objects on display.

On the left-hand side of the building are community group displays and information about forest fires that have occurred in the qathet region, such as one at Mowat Bay in June of 2004. Malaspina Naturalists have a display of nature and marine life in and around the region.

On the right-hand side of the building, the history of logging and the equipment used is organized and displayed in chronological order: from oxen and horses logging, to lugging logs on trains across steep trestles. Old handsaws and modern day chainsaws are also on display, along with photographs of loggers without protective gear, risking their lives in the early days of the industry.

"The Willingdon Beach Trail originated as a logging railway," said Taylor. "The logging company [until 1910, the Michigan-Puget Sound Logging Company] dumped its logs at the site of the pulp and paper mill in the Townsite."

When construction of the mill started in 1910, the railway grade was extended to a new dumpsite known as Michigan’s Landing, which was renamed Willingdon Beach.

According to Powell River Forestry Heritage Society, when logging ended in 1918, the rails remained for about eight years, then Bill Fishleigh persuaded the Powell River Company to remove the ties so the trail could be made into a cycle path. 

"The steam donkey on the trail was installed in 2001," said Taylor. "Then the trestle was built in 2003 under the leadership of Rudi van Zwaaij, who was a forester."

Higgins said that in 1986, the Powell River Forestry Museum Society was formed and opened the building as the Forestry Museum during Sea Fair 1988. 

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