Vernonia Friendship Jamboree and Logging Show

On the Saturday of the Vernonia Friendship Jamboree, people set chairs along Bridge Street before eleven in the morning. The parade forms at City Hall and runs to a finish past Spencer Park, with clowns, logging equipment, big trucks and floats. The organizers’ advice is to come early and bring a chair and a bag for candy. At the 2026 Jamboree, the 70th, chainsaw carvers worked on a moving parade float. The carvers donated nine carvings, and all nine were raffled off. The Vernonia Booster Club took first place among the floats that year, a reunion float for the Class of 1976 took second, and Maverick’s 4H Club took third.

The Jamboree runs Friday to Sunday on the first full weekend of August; the 2026 edition fell on August 7 to 9. It spreads across town. Food and novelty vendors line Adams Avenue, and shopping booths fill Spencer Park at 377 Bridge Street. A motorcycle show also runs at Spencer Park. The Columbia County Spotlight gave its host as the Disabled Veterans Motorcycle Club, and the Jamboree’s site gives it as the American Legion. American Legion Post 119 served an evening barbecue there in 2026. The Friends of the Vernonia Library hold a book sale at The Cabin on Park Drive, and a Kid Zone of inflatables and games runs all weekend on a daily bracelet. The program also lists live music, chainsaw artists, and classic air-cooled Volkswagens. Local groups raise their own money on the weekend. In 2013 the Lions club held its barbecued beef sale and collected glasses and hearing aids, and the senior center served pancake breakfasts.

“This is an opportunity for old friends to get together,” Ernie Smith, the 2013 chairman, told the Hillsboro Argus, “and to meet new friends.”

The logging show at Hawkins Park

The logging show is held at Hawkins Park, 930 Park Drive. An Oregon State University archive calls it the festival’s longest-running and most popular event. Children compete on Saturday and adults on Sunday, with sign-ups taken the day of each show. The organizers bill it as the longest-standing logging show in Oregon. Weyerhaeuser, a sponsor, calls it one of the longest-running west of the Mississippi.

Weyerhaeuser described the 2023 show. In the boom stick run, contestants try to cross logs laid in Rock Creek without falling, while spectators line the banks. In the pole fall, each competitor fells a 48-foot pole whose bottom six feet are buried in the ground. Craig Olson, who does value optimization for the company’s Western Timberlands and chooses the logs, described the event: “It’s a timed event, a test of accuracy. Contest organizers set out cans, and then the competitor tries to fall the pole log as close to the cans as possible — preferably hitting them.” Smith’s list in 2013 included “hot saws,” in which loggers run souped-up chain saws through 2-foot logs in seconds, and ax throwing. It also included what he called “log burrowing,” where “two men get on a log on the water and try to knock each other off by spinning the log.”

More than 80 young people signed up for the children’s events in 2023. The smallest stacked firewood and tossed hard hats, and the older ones threw axes and set chokers. Weyerhaeuser supplied 56 logs that year. Olson finds a nearby stand to meet the organizers’ specifications. He looks for big logs for contestants to jump over in the choker setting, and he sends timber blocks for axe targets. Mike Pihl, a Vernonia contractor and one of the originals from the Ax Men television show, brings his loader every year and sets up the logs for the choker run and the boom sticks. After the competitions the full logs are loaded and sent on. The leftover blocks go to the city, and the parks manager splits them into firewood for local families in need.

Weyerhaeuser has sponsored the show since 1992, and its support goes back to the Longview Fiber days. “Vernonia is pretty isolated — we say it’s 29 miles from anywhere — which means it’s a close community,” Olson said.

Softball, horses, and a derby at the millpond

The Vernonia Jamboree Softball Tournament is played on the baseball fields at Spencer Park. Organizers told the Spotlight in 2026 that it is the longest-running co-ed softball tournament in the nation; the Jamboree’s site calls it one of the longest-running in the United States. In 2013 Smith called it the longest-running annual softball tournament in Oregon. That year it fielded 12 teams, kept a waiting list years long, and raised scholarship money.

On Sunday the Vernonia Ridge Riders hold their play day at the Anderson Park Horse Arena on Jefferson Avenue. Youth, teens, adults and older riders run keyhole, pole bending, biwrangle and barrels. Smith said the horse games go back to the first Jamboree.

The fishing derby is held Saturday at Vernonia Lake. Registration runs from 6 to 8 a.m. at the water, and the weigh-in is from 3 to 4 p.m. Fifty people fished it in 2026. Robby Graham won the 0-12 class and took home a kayak with paddle, gear and life jacket. Sterling Taylor won the 13-17 class and caught the biggest fish, and Isayah Runyon won the adult class.

“Ain’t No More”

Vernonia Lake was once the 40-acre millpond of the Oregon-American Lumber Company. A paved trail circles it now, and red-winged blackbirds and blue herons frequent the water. At its edge stands the old powerhouse, the only structure of the mill still standing. It is roofless and covered in graffiti, with trees growing where the machinery stood.

Timber magnate David Eccles and his sons established the company in 1917, when Vernonia was a farming outpost of about 150 people. A rail line reached the Nehalem Valley in 1922. The company then built what it called “The Most Perfect Mill in the World,” of fire-resistant concrete and steel over more than 100 acres. When it opened on July 10, 1924, 225 workers took their stations; as The Oregonian later told it, there were no speeches. The mill could cut 350,000 board-feet in an eight-hour shift, and it kiln-dried all its lumber. The logs were old-growth Douglas fir, generally 300 to 600 years old, from 30,000 acres in Columbia, Clatsop and Tillamook counties. The town passed 1,500 residents and became the fastest-growing in Oregon. The Oregon Encyclopedia puts that by 1923, before the mill sawed its first log; the company’s historians put it by 1926.

The company was reorganized during the Depression. Long-Bell Lumber Company acquired it in 1953, and International Lumber Company in 1956. The last log came out of the woods on August 27, 1957, marked with a handwritten sign: “The Oregon-American Lumber Company 1922–1957. Ain’t No More.” Edward Kamholz writes that it was then the last integrated steam-powered stump-to-boxcar lumbering concern on the West Coast. The mill sawed its last log on September 11, 1957, and shipped its last lumber on April 19, 1958. In 1961 filmmakers burned part of the mill for the climax of Ring of Fire. The company housing was deeded to the city in 1960. The company office went on the National Register in 2002 and now houses the Vernonia Pioneer Museum.

The Jamboree came out of that closing. By the archive’s account, Vernonia came close to disappearing as residents left for work elsewhere. The Jamboree formed to reunite, if briefly, those who had moved away with those who stayed. The sources differ on the first year: the Hillsboro Argus gave 1956 in 2013, and the Tillamook Headlight Herald gave 1957 in 2014.

The Webbs, Ernie Smith, and Bill Hawkins

In August 2015 David Benac, a historian at Western Michigan University, recorded interviews in Vernonia about the town and its Jamboree. Donald R. Webb came to Vernonia in 1948 and competed in the first Jamboree logging show. He later served on the Jamboree Committee, where DeLoris M. Webb, who came from North Dakota the same year, served as treasurer. Ernie W. Smith logged around Vernonia off and on from 1979 to 2011, then bought a bar in town. He was Jamboree president in 2015 and was interviewed at that bar, The All In. Noni Anderson founded the Vernonia Independent and ran it for twenty-five years, and in that time it printed the Jamboree’s annual program. Casey and Josette Mitchell were interviewed by the old millpond, in the concrete shell of the Oregon-American chip shed. Casey Mitchell’s family bought the 100-acre mill site, and he kept the chip shed in hopes of making it an interpretive center on the area’s timber history. The recordings are held at Oregon State University in Corvallis. None has been transcribed.

Bill Hawkins died on Friday, August 7, 2026, the first day of the 70th Jamboree, after an accident the week before. The committee wrote that he “brought with him something that cannot be replaced—the knowledge, history, stories, and memories that connected us to Jamborees past.” Of the weekend it wrote: “His absence was felt throughout the weekend.”