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176 Chapter 14 A Destination Resort The view from a granite outcrop above the 60-acre Broughton Lumber Company mill site near Underwood takes in several derelict mill buildings, a world-famous windsurfing beach and the town of Hood River, Oregon, with Mount Hood looming beyond. It’s a good vantage point for taking in the history of logging in the Columbia Gorge, the industrial engine that drove the gorge economy for most of the twentieth century From 1923 to 1987, logs from private, state, and federal forests in Southwest Washington were cut into sections and sent on a fast ride down this mountainside via a nine-mile log flume to a planing mill along the railroad tracks near the mouth of the Little White Salmon River. Remnants of that historic flume remain visible from spots along Highway 14, although a 2006 fire destroyed most of the flume and with it, a vivid reminder of the heyday of logging in Skamania and Klickitat counties. Standing on the promontory on a November day in 2006, Broughton Lumber Company President Jason Spadaro described his company’s vision for this piece of land: A high-end destination resort, built to serve the windsurfers who converge on the gorge each summer to ride its legendary gusts. It took a leap of imagination to envision the shuttered mill buildings and rusting wigwam burner transformed into an upscale resort. But the proposal soon would confront the Columbia River Gorge Commission with one of its most controversial decisions yet: Whether to allow a large resort in the rural gorge that could become its own town, with year-round residents, and retail stores. On its face, the proposed Broughton Landing Project seemed an outright violation of the 1986 Scenic Area Act. But the issue was not black and white. Because the Broughton mill property had been an active industrial site in 1986, when Congress passed the National Scenic Area Act, its owners were allowed to redevelop it for limited commercial recreation use. The A DESTINATION RESORT 177 Broughton property was the only piece of land in the Scenic Area that qualified for the exemption. Broughton’s owners had applied for a permit to redevelop the site as a resort back in 1989, but they had later withdrawn that original application after doing the math and concluding it would not be profitable. Among other restrictions, the management plan limited the number of lodging units on the site to thirty-five. Now Broughton’s owners they were back, with a far more ambitious proposal. The Broughton family wanted a legacy, and was willing to pull political strings to get it. Broughton Lumber had been a major landowner and key power player in the gorge for most of a century. Its history was intertwined with that of SDS Lumber Company, an aggressive timber company with a highly competitive profile. The two companies had dominated the development of the timber industry since the 1920s. In 1923, members of the Stevenson and Broughton families built a mill in Willard, a remote outpost near the south boundary of the Gifford Pinchot National Forest. They also bought an unfinished flume designed to carry logs down the mountain on water diverted from the Little White Salmon River. The flume was completed and used for seventy years to bring raw material to market. The rough-sawn log sections, called cants, made the trip down to the planing mill on the river in fifty-five minutes. The finished lumber traveled by rail to customers in the gorge and in the fast-growing PortlandVancouver area. Broughton Lumber quickly became a major source of jobs in the small timber towns that grew up along the river. After World War II, new players arrived on the scene. In 1946, brothers Wally and Bruce Stevenson formed a partnership with Frank Daubenspeck, the longtime foreman at Broughton, and bought a bankrupt mill on the Columbia River at Bingen, in western Klickitat County. They incorporated as SDS Lumber Company. Two years later, the mill burned to the ground, but a portable sawmill at the site was soon up and running. Broughton Lumber and SDS Lumber thrived during the boom times of logging in the Northwest. The towns of Stevenson, Carson, Home Valley , Cook, and Bingen were built on timber from the forests of Southwest Washington and Oregon’s Hood River Valley. By 1960, Skamania County ranked fourth in timber production among Washington counties, with 345 million board feet logged annually. Timber jobs supported the...

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