File:Crew with donkey engine, Western Cooperage Company, Olney, ca 1920 (KINSEY 2633).jpeg

English: Caption on image: Western Cooperage Co., No 15 PH Coll 516.4742
The Western Cooperage Company was in the logging business as well as the barrel manufacturing business. Formally organized by Watson Eastman in Los Angeles towards the end of the nineteenth century, the company quickly spread to the Northwest after the turn of the century. The company became a large concern with plants in Seattle, Los Angeles, Aberdeen, and Houlton, among other places. In 1907 the company purchased 16,000 feet of timber in Clatsop County in Oregon. The plan was to build a large cooperage plant in Portland where the timber could be processed. The company picked a spot just south of the public dry dock at St. Johns (which would be annexed by the City of Portland in 1915). Meanwhile, the company established a small sawmill and camp in Olney, a small town south of Astoria. These images were likely taken in Olney. In 1922, the Portland branch of the Western Cooperage Company merged with the Wright-Blodgett Company, Limited and the Merrill Lumber Company to form the Tidewater Timber Company. The Astoria Southern Railway, of which Eastman had also been president, was included in the transaction. (Sources: "Will Build Plant Here: Western Cooperage Company Plans Factory" The Morning Oregonian, 08-19-1907; "New Plant to Employ 200 Men" The Morning Oregonian, 04-19-1914; and "Timber Firms Merged" Seattle Daily Times, 07-26-1922)

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