06/16/2026
There are three things that MRSR's crew are especially nerdy about: the Titanic, trains, and yes, WWII. 🚢 🚂 🪖
Today, we're avoiding giving you any updates about steam locomotives or passenger cars by distracting you with jazz hands and WWII facts. ✨🤗
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When most people think about World War II, they picture battlefields in Europe or islands in the Pacific. The story of the home front is just as important, and it reaches all the way into the forests of the Pacific Northwest.
Timber was a critical wartime resource. Lumber from Washington's forests was used to build military barracks, warehouses, docks, railroad infrastructure, shipping crates, and countless other necessities needed to support troops around the world. Logging was considered an essential wartime industry, and many loggers received draft deferments because their work was viewed as vital to the war effort.
Regardless, labor shortages became a problem. Thousands of workers enlisted despite their exempt status, leaving logging camps and sawmills scrambling to find enough people to keep production moving. Companies looked for workers wherever they could find them, and the workforce in the woods changed dramatically during the war years.
You didn't have to go far to see those changes. Right here in Eatonville, the Eatonville Lumber Company remained an important employer throughout the war. As men left for military service, women stepped into mill jobs as “lumberjills,” to help keep lumber production going.
Another change was far more painful. Before the war, Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans were a significant part of the workforce at the Eatonville Lumber Company and throughout the Pacific Northwest timber industry. In 1942, many of those neighbors were forcibly removed from their homes and sent to incarceration camps, disrupting families, communities, and industries across the region.
The labor shortage became so severe that federal officials even explored using some of the roughly 4,000+ German POWs held at nearby Fort Lewis to help address critical shortages in timber production and other industries. Most POWs remained on the base or worked in agriculture, but some were sent out on work details.
One young German POW, Robert Schweikart, later recalled being assigned to a forest detachment near Fort Lewis. His crew was sent into the woods to gather branches and brush and burn them. According to his memoir, the prisoners were not exactly under intense supervision: the American civilians accompanying them went into a hut while the POWs sat around the fire telling jokes.
At one point, Schweikart and the other prisoners decided to play a prank. Using tree stumps, charcoal, spit, and axes, they created loud bangs that sounded like rifle fire just as American soldiers marched by on a nearby road. The soldiers scattered, the guards rushed out, and after a stern scolding, everyone eventually laughed.
It is a strange little story: funny, unsettling, and very human. It also shows how close the global war came to this region. German POWs were being held just down the road, local industries were desperate for labor, and even the forests around Fort Lewis became part of the wartime home front.
The railroads that served the timber industry faced their own wartime challenges. Steel, fuel, equipment, and spare parts were all in short supply. Logging companies relied heavily on their railroads to move timber from the woods to the mills, while aging steam locomotives were kept running long past when they might otherwise have been retired. Locomotives and equipment that could no longer earn their keep were often scrapped as part of the war effort.
Many of the logging railroads that helped support the war effort are gone. Their locomotives were scrapped, their tracks were removed, and the camps they served have long disappeared into the forest.
The equipment preserved at Mt. Rainier Scenic Railroad helps keep those stories alive and reminds us that history isn't just about machines. It's about the people whose lives were shaped by them. History is rarely simple, but it's always worth remembering.
