Northwest artist Kenneth Callahan’s 1944 Weyerhaeuser murals find a new home at Everett Station on February 4, 2002.

On February 4, 2002, the Everett Station transportation hub opens to the public. The facility features artwork integrated into the building, including a series of murals depicting the stages of logging and lumbering, painted in 1944 by Northwest artist Kenneth Callahan (1905-1986) for the former Weyerhaeuser Mill B cafeteria in Everett.

Everett Station

On February 4, 2002, Everett Station officially opened as the city’s new multimodal transportation center. It combines Everett Transit bus service, Snohomish County Community Transit, regional Sound Transit, and Greyhound Lines in one location. Amtrak and Sound Transit trains were added a few years later. The new facility also provided space for college classes, community meetings, and city offices. The firm Zimmer Gunsul Frasca (ZGF Architects) designed the building, which features a brick and glass exterior and a copper roof. It is essentially two separate buildings connected by a four-story, light-filled lobby and waiting area with a glass atrium, staircase, and clock, the artwork of Camano Island artist Jack Archibald.

The artworks were funded through the City of Everett’s Public Art Funding Ordinance, administered by the Everett Cultural Commission. Qualified projects can be works that are directly integrated into a building project or are permanent or mobile. The Archibald Clock, titled Millennial Chronometer was an important built-in feature, but some of the most significant pieces added were not new, but works of art with a story. When the station opened Everett-Herald Reporter Ron Glowan wrote:

“The artistic coup is the restoration and installation of the ‘Weyerhaeuser Murals,’ oil paintings on canvas by famed Northwest artist Kenneth Callahan created in 1944 for the cafeteria of Weyerhaeuser Mill B. Shaped to fit over doors and windows, these narrow canvases chronicle the life cycle of the lumber industry in broad, representative strokes of color, shape and form” (“Culture Pulls Into Station,” 58).

Weyerhaeuser and Callahan

In April 1944, Weyerhaeuser’s newsletter appeared Cee and Bee announced: “Like a sunset, ‘The Forest Industry,’ the first painting ever created specifically for a sawmill, dawned before astonished onlookers and greeted customers at the Big W Cafeteria on Monday morning, April 3.” This marked the completion of Callahan’s logging and forestry-themed murals installed in the Mill B Cafeteria (“Mill Murals On the Move”).

In 1944, Callahan’s national reputation as a prominent young painter of the Northwest School made him a good choice for the work. He had a studio at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM), where he served as curator from 1937 to 1961. During the summers he worked as a fire lookout in the North Cascades. Callahan and his wife, Margaret Callahan (1904-1961), had a small studio near Granite Falls, where he painted the Mill B murals. Callahan had become interested in mural painting in the early 1930s and traveled to Mexico to meet muralists Diego Rivera (1886-1957) and Jose Orozco (1883-1949). He was impressed by their powerful large-scale paintings, as well as their emphasis on working-class power. The Rivera murals “Detroit Industry” at the Detroit Institute of Art, created in 1932-1933, may have been a direct influence. By the time he received the commission for Weyerhaeuser, Callahan had already completed murals that had appeared in various locations around the region, including one in Weyerhaeuser’s office in Tacoma.

Linden N. Reichmann (1894-1977), the manager of Weyerhaeuser Everett, commissioned the artist to paint murals for the mill town of Everett. Callahan was asked to depict the various stages of lumber extraction and logging. Callahan did so, depicting workers heroically portrayed as Paul Bunyan figures. This was a challenging project because the paintings had to fit around windows, doors, and a curved roofline. A 4-foot by 8-foot panel depicted Mill B. Because Callahan had to paint in the small studio in Granite Falls, he had to do the murals in sections. He spent six months making color drawings and then another six months transferring the drawings to canvas. In total, the murals consisted of 18 pieces. The project took a year to complete. After installation, Weyerhaeuser claimed the murals were the only artwork of its kind in a sawmill at the time. The cafeteria at Mill B was open to both workers and the public.

Removal, storage, revival

Weyerhaeuser closed Mill B in 1979. It had opened in 1915 as the country’s first all-electric mill. To preserve Callahan’s artwork, the company hired San Francisco art conservator James Pennuto in 1974 to clean, restore and remove the murals and prepare them for storage. It took Pennuto 15 days to remove decades of dirt, soot and smoke, restore damaged areas, protect the murals with a layer of Japanese rice paper, and then carefully peel them off the walls and roll them up onto 12-inch-diameter cardboard tubes.

The Weyerhaeuser Company oversaw the conservation efforts and provided archival storage. Some of the pieces were framed for display at Weyerhaeuser’s facilities, but the majority were kept in the company’s archives. In 1992, 14 of the original 18 murals were given to the City of Everett. Plans for Everett’s multimodal transportation center provided an opportunity to display them again.

Art conservator Peter Malarkey set about the task of preparing and installing sections of the mural in Everett Station. First, he unrolled the canvas sections, smoothed them out, and then removed the rice paper coverings. He also removed some leftover dirt and glue and wall material that had stuck to the backing. Scuffs and small tears were repaired, stabilized and painted, and then aligned and adhered to the walls. The final step was to apply a protective coat of varnish to the murals. To preserve their original appearance, Malarkey tried to keep all of Callahan’s seams and repairs. Amazingly, by design or luck, the rooflines of Mill B and Everett Station were similarly curved and easily accommodated two of the largest sections of the mural. These were installed in the station’s fourth-floor multipurpose room, whose doorways were designed to accommodate the murals. Other sections were installed in wall niches on the second and third floors, with no modifications to the artwork necessary.

When the murals were removed in 1974, Callahan noted that he did not consider them to be his best work and that he would not want to paint the same paintings today, but added, “They were good things… an artist always does what he thinks is right. I do not regret in the least that I did them” (“Mill Murals Moving”). That same year Everett-Herald Reporter Jeanne Metzger summed up the significance of the murals in three ways. First, they provide a historical glimpse into the lumber industry of the 1940s; second, they are an example of Callahan’s work; and third, they remain a testament to Linden Reichmann, the Everett manager of Weyerhaeuser, who believed that an industrial environment could be a fitting place for art.

Sources:

Jeanne Metzger, “Mill murals in motion”, Everett Daily HeraldMarch 30, 1974, p. 3; Ron Glowen, “Culture Pulls Into Station,” Ibid.1 March 2002, pp. 57-58: HistoryLink Online Encyclopedia of Washington State History, “Everett Station opens February 4, 2002” (by Kit Oldham) and “Callahan, Kenneth (1905-1986)” (by Delores Tarzan Ament) and “Weyerhaeuser’s first Washington Mill begins operations in Everett on April 8, 1903” (by Margaret Riddle), http://www.historylink.org (accessed July 25, 2024); Ardell Brandenberg, “Weyerhaeuser Murals at Everett Station,” a brochure by the Everett Cultural Commission, 2002.

Licensing: This essay is licensed under a Creative Commons License, which encourages reproduction with attribution. Both HistoryLink.org and the author must be credited, and sources must be given in any reproduction. Click the icon for more information. Please note that this Creative Commons License applies only to text, not images. For more information about individual photos or images, please contact the source indicated in the photo credit.

Substantial support for HistoryLink.org provided by:
The State of Washington | Patsy Bullitt Collins | Paul G. Allen Family Foundation | Museum of History and Industry | 4Culture (King County lodging tax revenue) | City of Seattle | City of Bellevue | City of Tacoma | King County | The Peach Foundation | Microsoft Corporation, other public and private sponsors, and visitors like you