PAT NEAL: May Day for the Shingle Weavers

Published 1:30 am Wednesday, April 29, 2026

MAY DAY IS a holiday of ancient origins that has found new meaning in our modern world of the future.

May Day was a time for pagans everywhere to celebrate the seasonal renewal of life.

It meant you survived the winter. That was something to celebrate in a world plagued with starvation, disease and warfare.

Thanks to the Puritans, some of the biggest party-poopers on the planet, May Day didn’t catch on as a major holiday in America.

That was until the industrial age when dangerous working conditions caused a movement to form unions and take action.

By the 1880s, labor unions began striking to get an eight-hour work day.

On May 1, 1886, about 500,000 workers across the country walked off their jobs and started protesting.

On the Olympic Peninsula, Shingle Weavers were the first union to organize in 1890.

Shingle weavers got their name from the amazing speed and precision of the shingle packers.

They weaved and strapped the shingles into bundles and stacked bundles into pallets that could be transported and sold.

The shingles fell like snowflakes down a chute from the shingle sawyer, who worked above the packer.

Being a shingle sawyer remains one of the most dangerous jobs you can have.

You put a block into a saw with two blades. One cut the shingle from the block, the other trimmed the shingle.

The shingle sawyer got his blocks from a deck crew that split the blocks from massive rounds cut from cedar logs that had been hauled into the mill on a conveyer.

The blocks were jerked and slid across the steel deck with a picaroon, an axe-like tool with a gull-shaped beak that could sink into wood or flesh with ease.

The goal was to swamp or overload the next guy with wood.

The deck crew swamped the sawyer, the sawyer swamped the packer. On a good day.

This was piece work.

The more wood you cut, the more money you made.

This operation was loud.

If you got hurt, which is a very real possibility, you could scream as loud as you wanted to and no one would hear you.

Missing fingers and abbreviated appendages were a common sight among shingle weavers.

The interior of a shingle mill had a medieval atmosphere of dust and noise.

In the mill I worked at — yes, I was a Shingle Weaver — the cutoff saw was 10 feet in diameter.

One day it was hit by lightning. That was quite an explosion, but that’s another story.

The cutoff saw bit into the logs with a roar.

The massive rounds of wood hit the steel deck with a boom that could shake your bones.

That was nothing compared to the shingle saws that screamed like infernal banshees until quitting time.

Ear plugs were a luxury.

Deafness was inevitable.

Red lung, a pulmonary condition like the black lung of our coal mining brothers, could kill you just as dead.

When they started out in 1890s, the Shingle Workers were working a 10-hour day, sometimes six days a week.

By the time I joined the union in the 1970s, we worked six hours a day, five days a week.

While a man worked, his wife could stay home to raise the family.

They probably owned their home.

He likely owned a boat to go fishing on his vacation.

When he retired, there was a pension waiting for him.

The Shingle Weavers Union and the giant old growth cedar trees they cut are commercially extinct.

The union has been replaced by the gig economy.

Sometimes, progress isn’t.

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Pat Neal is a Hoh River fishing and rafting guide and “wilderness gossip columnist” whose column appears here every Wednesday.

He can be reached at 360-683-9867 or by email via patnealproductions@gmail.com.