NOTE: “Today” and “tonight” refer to Friday, June 5.
PORT TOWNSEND — Photos and tales will bring the “History of Olympic Peninsula Logging” to life at 7 p.m. today.
The Jefferson County Historical Society’s First Friday Lecture features Jack Zaccardo, who has lectured on logging history for more than 45 years.
The talk will be in council chambers at historic City Hall, 540 Water St.
Admission is by donation. Proceeds will support historical society programs.
Zaccardo is a retired state Department of Natural Resources forester and is the fourth generation of his family to work in the timber industry.
His great-grandfather, an Italian shoemaker, immigrated to the Olympic Peninsula, where he found work in the logging industry.
His grandfather lived on the Blyn homestead and was a logger, mill owner and forest fire warden.
His father was a logger and mill worker who met his mother when she worked in a camp cookhouse.
Zaccardo is past chairman of the Olympic Logging Conference and past director of the Pacific Logging Congress.
He uses his maternal grandfather Bert Kellog’s collection of slides and negatives to show how logging evolved from 1880 to the 1930s.
He will explain the transition from Native American techniques to oxen and horse and steam yarding.
Other photos illustrate transporting the logs from the woods to the mill with early trucks and railroad as well as images of early workers and settlers.
