Spruce Soldiers

The soldiers on this panel came with a union attached. To end the 1917 lumber strikes the Wobblies had led, Col. Brice Disque paired his army loggers with the Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen, a government-sponsored company union whose first local was organized at Wheeler, Oregon, on October 30, 1917. Members swore a loyalty oath, active Wobblies were barred, and employers who wanted the soldiers had to grant the eight-hour day. A Smith-Powers logger in this country remembered the IWW scare as clean sheets and bugless bunkhouses. The union peaked near 110,000 members in 1918.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Bandon — 12 mi
  A town at the mouth of the Coquille built near the site of an 1854 massacre, named for a town in Ireland, and burned in 1936 by the Irish gorse its founder planted.
• Shore Acres State Park — 14 mi
  A timber family's clifftop estate whose mansion burned three months after its mistress died, whose larger replacement the state could not keep, and whose gardens it did.
• Cape Blanco Lighthouse — 30 mi
  The westernmost light in Oregon, kept for decades by two men who spent their whole careers on the cape and, from 1903, by the state's first woman keeper.

More markers nearby

• Beaver Hill Mine — 4.1 mi
• Southern Oregon Coast Region — 13 mi
• The Hollering Place — 16 mi
• Coos Bay - Explore More — 16 mi