Thousands of artifacts from Aberdeen’s history gone in a fire, including a Kurt Cobain exhibit
You can find
But the latest hit wasn't about the economy, although
The hit came from a disastrous fire last week that burned thousands of irreplaceable artifacts from the area's hardscrabble history.
And history matters here in this gritty town still reeling from the collapse of the logging industry, and where working-class families have lived for generations.
The fire Saturday gutted the
The cause of the fire remains under investigation, according to
The two-story structure housed the
The flames were 20 or 30 feet high, he remembers. The billowing smoke reached the clouds, carrying away the ashes of thousands of historical items that fed the flames.
"We were totally helpless. All we could do was watch the fire progress and basically chew up the building," he says.
The main floor of the museum, some 11,000 square feet, was the exhibit area.
"Gone. Gone," says Morris when talking about those exhibits. It was a word that he repeated often.
For Nirvana fans, and on news sites, the main interest about the fire was that a display about
The museum had become a stop for fans who sought to visit the places with some connection to Cobain.
But the T-shirts, drawings and memorabilia on display never actually belonged to Cobain.
The closest thing to an original Cobain artifact on display was a couch that the teenager slept on while staying for about a year in 1985 at the home of
Cobain would have been around 18 and had left his home after an argument with his mother, according to numerous accounts of his early years.
Morris said the couch -- which looked like it would have fit in fine at some budget motel -- wasn't cordoned off, so fans could sit or lie down on it and pose for a photo.
"Gone," says Morris.
Looking at the armory from the outside, it's hard to imagine the devastation inside.
The white concrete walls are intact. The building, after all, was constructed as an armory, and over the years was used by 12 different
But drone video of the fire posted on social media shows the roof collapsed and exposed an interior of charred beams and rubble.
A photo provided by the city's fire department shows the museum's main floor completely blackened by the fire. Blue sky shows through the building's roof. The floor is littered with scorched lumber and rubble lying in puddles of water.
For Morris, one of the big losses in the fire was the
Beginning in 1959, McCausland drew cartoons before and after each
After retirement in 1981, McCausland moved to the area and drew cartoons for
"Gone," says Morris about the Hairbreadth cartoons.
He goes through the disastrous list.
"All the stuff from the unions. Gone," he says. Until the collapse of logging,
In 2016,
But in the museum were the relics of how in the early 1900s, this area was at the heart of the Wobblies -- the
"Longshoremen, shingle weavers, sailors, and electrical workers all struck alongside the mill hands. The immediate cause of the conflict was the low wages paid at the Harbor's mills," recounts the
Sawmill workers regularly lost fingers, hands and arms to the swirling saws.
Loggers knew they could easily lose their lives. One said that there were "49 different ways to get killed in the woods."
And wages were so low that a visitor recounted, "I have seen children -- sons and daughters of the working mill hands -- come to the backyard of the hotel and pick old scraps of meat and bread from the garbage cans."
The destroyed boxes of IWW items in storage at the museum were largely uncataloged, and so what was inside them isn't known.
The list of items lost in the armory fire continues. Burned was a historical switchboard -- the kind where the operator manually connected callers by plugging phone lines into the correct circuit.
Next to the switchboard was an old photo of a young woman working it. Now elderly, she regularly attended an exercise program at the armory.
All gone.
This week, both the state archives and
Photos and documents stored there are now under 4feet of water from the firefighting efforts.
Even so, the damage could be worse, said
"Actually, we're coming out pretty good on this," he said.
Some paper materials that got wet have been frozen by
The state archives was taking the heavily soaked and important materials. No vaporization chamber in this case; just simply hanging the stuff on clothes lines in a room set to 50 to 60 degrees and 50 to 60 percent humidity. It works.
The museum was insured for "replacement value of building and contents," says
But how much monetary value to put on that old
"That's going to be the difficult part," says Larson.
Devastating fires are part of
In 1903, a fire destroyed 140 buildings in the center of town.
The Great Fire of 1918 that again destroyed most of the buildings in town.
In 2002 a couple of kids set fire to the landmark
On the museum's Facebook page, a woman posted, "The museum will rise again!"
You get knocked down, you just get up again, that's the
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