One Man's Museum Mission

Retired logger Robert Allen always valued the old equipment used in the timber industry’s early days. So 30 years ago he embarked on a one-man mission to preserve it. Today he’s built a lasting tribute to this dying industry and its pioneers, founding the J. Howard Bradbury Memorial Logging Museum in Pierce, Idaho.

“I started packing stuff home thinking I was saving its life,” says Allen, who worked as a bulldozer driver and woods foreman for the Potlatch Corp. for close to 40 years. Starting in the early ’70s, Allen toted home everything from antique chain saws and misery whips (two-man saws) to a forge and bellows.

In 1978, Allen spied the very thing that could give his dream a firm foundation: a local relic named the Bert Curtis log cabin. “Now there is the start of a museum,” he thought.

After getting permission from the Clearwater-Potlatch Timber Protective Association (CTPA), which owned the Curtis cabin, Allen and another Potlatch employee used two fork loaders to move it to the town of Headquarters. Allen started renovations for a museum, but a big slump in the lumber market devastated the town, bringing his project to a standstill.

Determined to keep his dream alive, in 1989, Allen decided to move the cabin to Pierce, where he and his wife Jeanette lived. He approached Potlatch and Pierce officials for permission and the following year formed a nonprofit organization with support from businesses, loggers, and townspeople.

“We stuck out our neck for $20,000 to buy the land,” says Allen. “Then we poured a new foundation for the cabin.”

Pierce, a town of 617 residents that has been crippled by downturns in the timber industry, became the guardian of the region’s logging history.

“It’s been a great thing for this town. It really draws people,” says Ray Coon, an ex-logger who has donated artifacts and helped Allen haul equipment.

He has watched Allen and Jeanette literally construct the museum, hauling boards, hammering nails, and roofing outbuildings. “They have done a lot of the work on their own,” Coon says.

Today Allen points with pride to photos of old logging camps and log drives on the Clearwater River—where lumberjacks guided thousands of logs downstream with poles for eventual transport to mills. He shows off several broad axes and a crosscut saw filing shack (where saws and axes were sharpened by file and stone). He even has a piece of an old cedar tree with renowned wilderness explorer/naturalist John Muir’s name and date (1908) inscribed on it.

Even though Allen admits that his grounds are full, he finds it impossible to turn down donations.

“A while ago we did some horse trading with the CTPA for this 80-foot forest lookout tower that was used as a fire-spotting station. They tore it down with a helicopter, and it is sitting in my yard,” Coon says.

The museum, dedicated in 1992, is named after Howard Bradbury, a former logging superintendent, who Allen says “had feelings for the working man.” Now one of the biggest tourist draws in the area, the memorial attracts visitors from as far away as Germany and China. Allen keeps it open every weekend from noon to 4 p.m. from mid-June through mid-October.

His efforts have earned him the Esto Perpetua Award for civic service from the Idaho Historical Society. “One of my sisters turned me in,” Allen says. His sister, Alexandra Davis of Kamiah, Idaho, plans to do a video on the museum.

Creating a special place to honor the region’s past and the loggers who are part of that past taps into Allen’s fascination with bygone times and people. “Local history was always my favorite subject,” he says. “I’ve always had a spot in my heart for older people, too.”

Karen Karvonen is a frequent contributor to American Profile.

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