Elliott State Forest History

Founding the Elliott State Forest

When Oregon was admitted as a state in 1859, Oregon was given two sections out of every 36-section Township for the development of primary education (K-12). Between the time of admission in 1859 and the 1920s, the state was unable to sell or otherwise derive any income from these lands scattered all across the state. The State Forester at the time, Francis Elliott, was instrumental in the trade with the Siuslaw National Forest whereby the Forest Service got the scattered lands and the State got a consolidated chunk of burnt-over timberland south of the Umpqua River; the bulk of the present-day Elliott State Forest.

At the time of the trade, roughly 90 percent of the land had burned repeatedly in catastrophic forest fires, so the timber stands were too young to harvest. Actual harvesting of the Elliott State Forest didn't begin in earnest until 1955. Most of the first harvests focused on removing the best timber: the remnant old-growth stands that hadn't burned by earlier fires. Today, few acres of these original old-growth trees remain, and all management plans since the 1980s have placed them off-limits for logging. The largest and best example of old-growth forest on the Elliott State Forest is the 50-acre Jerry Phillips Reserve that's been permanently protected by the Oregon legislature.

A more thorough discussion of the Elliott State Forest's creation and early history can be found at the History page of the Elliott Secrets website.

Shutting down the Elliott

Between 2009 and 2014, an increasing number of protests occurred about harvesting trees on the Elliott. These protests involved actions like chaining protesters in Oregon Department of Forestry offices, blocking roads, or dangling protesters in trees from ropes. These protests were effective at generating publicity.

In 2014, the State of Oregon reached a settlement with three conservation organizations, the Center for Biological Diversity, Cascadia Wildlands, and Portland Audubon, to cancel 28 timber sales in the Elliott, Clatsop, and Tillamook forests. This agreement is described in "Victory in the Elliott State Forest! 28 Oregon Coast Timber Sales Cancelled", Earth First! Newswire, February 6, 2014:

"As an organization that works directly with rural communities and the climate justice movement, Cascadia Forest Defenders can’t really get behind land privatization or carbon trading—a false solution to climate change,” [said Ben Jones of Cascadia Forest Defenders, a Eugene-based direct action group] . “The Common School Fund system is unjust and broken, and it’s not really our job to fix it." [Emphasis added]

In June 2016, the Oregon Department of Forestry was removed as manager of the Elliott State Forest. Since then, no harvesting has happened on the Elliott, and no plans for future harvesting exist.

Building an Elliott Archive

History secrets are created by the ravages of time as people die, memories fade, and documents get thrown away.

To prevent these secrets, someone needs to find, collect, organize and archive information before it's destroyed, either inadvertently or as part of the DSL Retention Schedule, and the ODF Retention Schedule.

We want to acknowledge that both the Department of State Lands and the OSU College of Forestry have provided a small amount of financial support in the past to capture and preserve historical information about the Elliott forest. Still, what is needed today is an effort to make materials available in a well organized online format.

To help with this process, Oregon Websites and Watersheds Project has begun building an Elliott Archive at www.ElliottArchive.Org. We've began filling it with a small part of the super content that we've assembled oveer the years. We recommend taking a few minutes to look at the ElliottArchive before reading further.

We expect this archive will be hosted as a MediaWiki, and we are optimistic it will grow in the same way Wikipedia has become the world's encyclopedia.