My Daughters Collier Logging Museum Report

This is the report my 10 year old daughter wrote about the Collier Logging Museum for her 4th grade project about something in Oregon.  She worked really hard on this and obtained the vast majority of her information from the wonderful tour guide at the museum, the online brochure available at the Collier Logging Museum website, and the signs around the museum.  She also used a picture from the Collier Logging Museum website to show the "Tools of the Trade."  She really loved the museum and had a great time working on this project.  However, this was written by a ten year old, so it may not be 100% accurate, but she gave it her best shot and aced her assignment.

Poster for Collier Logging Museum Report

Logging has undergone a transformation in the last 100 and 20 years. It has literally gone from Horses to Cats. What I mean by this is loggers started out logging using horses and oxen to pull wagons and trees that were cut. Eventually they started using cats, not cats that meow, but caterpillars and not caterpillars that turn into butterflies. I am talking about the machines called caterpillars that can pull and push tons of logs at a time. I learned this and a lot more at the Collier State Park Logging Museum.

The Collier State Park Logging Museum, which is near Chiloquin in Oregon, has the best and largest collection of logging equipment in the United States. The museum started in 1945 when Alfred and Andrew Collier donated 146 acres of land to Oregon and then donated some of their logging equipment. Now this land contains the Collier Logging Museum, a fun day area to picnic and play in, a camping area, and some foot bridges to walk across Spring Creek.

My favorite part of the state park is the Collier Logging Museum because it has lots of cool exhibits with logging stuff and trains and old cabins. This museum is really different from other museums because it is outside, free, open all the time, and you get to walk around all sorts of huge equipment. If you go to the museum during the summer, like I did, then you get to have a tour guide show you around.

Welcoming you to the museum is a really cool Collier Logging Museum sign and then the gift shop. The first thing you get to see if you take a tour is a slice from a tree that was hundreds of years old. It started growing before Christopher Columbus set sail from Spain and is the largest Douglas Fir ever cut down in Oregon. Actually it wasn’t cut down, it was blown down by a big storm and then cut into pieces.

The next stop on the tour is the blacksmith shop. The blacksmith is a must for every logging camp. This is where horseshoes and later the metal around tires were made. It’s also where any metal tools for logging were made. Here are some of tools of the trade made by blacksmiths.

After this, there are a bunch of stops, so I’m going to tell you about my favorite exhibits. The next exhibit that I really liked was the GOP. The GOP is one of the early steam locomotives used to pull logs out of the woods. GOP means Get Out and Push, because it fell off the train tracks all of the time.

The McGiffert Log Loader sat on top of railroad tracks and loaded logs directly into log carts on trains. The one at the museum is huge. When it is working, it walks along the railroad tracks by itself and pulls log cars through its legs to slap a load of logs on it, then grabs another log car and does it again. Equipment like this made logging a lot faster.

Another exhibit called “Stout Abner” is a giant steam engine used to supply power to an entire logging company. You can walk up the steps to get close to it. It has seven boilers that burned sawmill residue or sawdust to create the steam that gave the logging company power. “Stout Abner” was named after Abner Weed who founded the town Weed, California.

One of the more modern pieces of equipment at the museum is the log harvester. The log harvester was operated by one person and could take out a forest faster than an entire logging crew a hundred years ago. The log harvester works by grabbing the bottom of the tree and snaps it off the ground, then it removes all of the branches and limbs. Then it flips the tree sideways and loads it onto a truck. Today log harvesters are still used in logging but a new one costs a million dollars and is operated using a computer.

Pioneer Village is a neat place in the museum. It has 14 old cabins and buildings that are filled with stuff that was used in the olden days. All of the buildings were moved into one section of the museum, but they came from all over Oregon.

My favorite is the Sawbones cabin because it is like an old hospital for loggers. Doctors used to be called sawbones because they often had to saw off limbs, as in arms and legs, when loggers got hurt.  My second favorite building was the Gilchrist Cabin because the pioneer who was building it to be his homestead didn’t get to finish building it because he got killed by Indians. The people at the museum don’t plan to ever finish it because it shows how hard things were back then for pioneers.

My next favorite cabin is the Bear Flat General Store because it has lots of old time grocery stuff in it like bottles and counters. The funniest building in the Pioneer Village was one of the outhouses, which is where people went to the bathroom, because it had two spots side by side to go to the bathroom together with no door in between. It was kind of gross, but funny.

Diorama of Mr. Puckett's Log Tug Boat

My poster shows my favorite exhibits at the Collier Logging Museum, and a map of where they are located, and a timeline that shows the improvements made in logging over the years.

My diorama shows an old logging tug boat pulling a log raft behind it. The picture of the tugboat is one from the museum that belonged to Mr. Puckett. Mr. Puckett used the tug boat to move a million board feet of Ponderosa Pine trees from Agency Landing to Algoma in about twenty hours each time he made a trip.


They say that he didn’t like to ride inside the cabin during the hauls, instead he liked to run around all over the logs and outside of the boat like a cat. In fact, he said he didn’t consider himself wet until his hat started floating because he was totally covered with water.

When I was at the Collier Logging Museum, the tour guide found out that I was doing a report on the museum for school and he gave me these cool postcards to show you. One of them shows a Golden Mantel Squirrel, which looks like a chipmunk. You can see them running around all over the museum and they like to beg for food.

Another one shows the original State Park Logging Museum sign. One shows a Loggers homestead, which is located in Pioneer Village, and has lots of old household stuff like a table and bed in it. One shows the Mcgiffert Log Loader being used a long time ago.

Postcards From Collier Logging Museum
These are copyrighted by Leon Stumpff
Available for Sale at the Collier Logging Museum Gift Shop

Do NOT use or reuse these postcard images
Showing these pictures here is not intended to be a copyright infringement.

I really like the Collier State Park Logging Museum and I think everyone should try to visit if they can. Just remember that while you are there you will need mosquito repellent because the mosquitoes are big and mean and like to bite.

And you need to watch out for something even bigger and meaner, because there are bears all over the museum. Just look for the wood carvings of bears and other cool stuff if you go there. Does anyone have any questions?