Tillamook Burn - Restoration

Restoration

Much of the lands of the Tillamook burn had come to be owned by the counties of Tillamook, Yamhill, and Washington through foreclosures on unpaid property taxes; at the time of the forest fires, most of the land was owned by timber companies, which also paid the cost of fighting the fires. A measure was submitted by the Legislative Assembly to the voters to float a bond to finance reforestation, which narrowly passed in 1948.

In a book published that same year, Stewart Holbrook wrote about the Tillamook burn in Northwest Corner: Oregon and Washington:

can never compensate for that tragedy we call the Tillamook Burn, as somber a sight as to be viewed this side of the Styx. There they stand, millions of ghostly firs, now stark against the sky, which were green as the sea and twice as handsome, until an August day of 1933, when a tiny spark blew into a hurricane of fire that removed all life from 300,000 acres (1,200 km²) of the finest timber even seen. It was timber, too, that had been 400 years in the making. It was wiped out in a few seething hours which Oregon will have reason to remember well past the year 2000. To this day the forest stands powerless against the threat of wildfires.

Reforestation was performed simultaneously with research into the best methods. Many local Oregonians believe that replanting the Tillamook Burn was performed by school children volunteering a Saturday afternoon when their labor only met about 1% of the total effort; this was a brilliant public relations coup created by Arthur W. Priaulx of the West Coast Lumberman's Association in 1950.

On July 18, 1973, 24 years to the day after the reforestation bond was signed into law, Governor Tom McCall dedicated the Tillamook Burn as the Tillamook State Forest.

At the time the reforestation of the Tillamook Burn began, it was assumed that the forest land would, when the trees were mature, be harvested for lumber. Current environmental beliefs have questioned this assumption, and both the proportions and specific parts of this land that will be logged or conserved for wildlife are in dispute.