FORKS TIMBER MUSEUM DRAWING THOUSANDS OF VISITORS

By Chris Cook - Forks Forum editor

The Forks Timber Museum boosts the area’s economy as well as telling the story of logging in, and portrays the history of, the Forks area.

Sherrill Fouts, director of the Forks Timber Museum, told the Wednesday morning gathering of the West End Business and Professional Association that a conservative estimate of well over 5,000 seasonal visitors tour the museum each year.
Fouts said that by using percentages derived from a Smithsonian Institution study of small museums in the United States, she determined that about 4,800 of the visitors buy something in Forks. Those visitors spend an average of $50 per person, adding about a quarter million dollars to the local economy each warm-weather visitor season.

“That’s not a whopping number, but one that would be missed,” Fouts said.

“They are curious about the (pioneers and early loggers)?how they made a living,” Fouts said of the visitors.
Some visitors state “don’t understand why someone would choose to live out here,” she is told. Others turn argumentative about logging and what they perceive as its negative impact on the environment. Fouts said she’s had to escort a few visitors out the door.

With most people in the U.S. now living in urban and suburban areas there is a draw to rural communities like Forks she said, with interest in the mountains, streams, ocean, hunting, whaling and other topics related to the West End.
They find Forks residents “friendly, helpful, they don’t try to impress people.” The visitors are also “amazed at how long it takes to get places” in the area.

Some 25 percent of the visitors she greets at the museum are return visitors, she said.
Favorite souvenirs of Forks include suspenders, hats, posters and photos. The log-walled museum was built by a Forks High School carpentry class with the help of volunteers and donated equipment, she said.

Some see a hike along the trails located behind the timber museum as a real walk on the wild side, Fouts said, and feel a connection to the forest and wild animals in a setting which most Forks residents would see as pretty tame.
A grant is being sought to digitize a series of oral history videotapes Lonnie Archibald created in the past, and film clips are being gathered to create a documentary on the work and culture of the local logging industry.

Donations of family photographs and logging artifacts are welcome, Fouts said, but warned they might not immediately be put on display. “Photos sometimes solve mysteries,” she said, with visual information connecting the dots between historical facts already known. She said Larry Burtness has played a big role in developing the museum’s photography collection.

Posted February 6, 2008