The Flax Plant on Emerick’s Land

In the winter of 2020, my wife mentioned that one of the big buildings on Flax Plant Road was being torn down. I had no particular knowledge of the buildings there or of the flax industry, but I assumed that something that had occupied that much space for that many decades must have been important once. So I drove over to have a look.

The Land

The site of the Cornelius Flax Plant sits about a mile south of town, on land that was originally part of the donation land claim of Solomon Emerick, pioneer of 1843. If that name sounds familiar to regular readers of Heart of the Plains, it should. Solomon Emerick is the man whose landing at the bend of the Tualatin River was the furthest point upriver that Captain Joseph Kellogg’s steamer Onward could reliably reach on her Thursday runs in the 1860s. Thousands of bushels of wheat were loaded onto that little sternwheeler at Emerick’s Landing, just downstream from the site where the flax plant would one day stand.

The land also held the first schoolhouse in Free Orchards, the community that would become Cornelius, built around 1851 from logs donated by Solomon Emerick himself, held together with wooden pegs, lit by strips of muslin greased with lard. Charity Marsh taught the first students there, on the banks of the Tualatin River, on the same ground where workers would one day build retting tanks and flax storage sheds for the United States government. Solomon Emerick’s land has seen a great deal of history.

America Prepares for War

In the spring of 1940, with France and Britain struggling against Germany and the United States clearly unprepared for the war that was coming, Congress granted the Reconstruction Finance Corporation sweeping powers to do whatever was necessary for the nation’s defense. The Defense Plant Corporation was chartered in August of that year, and over the next five years it disbursed more than nine billion dollars on 2,300 projects across 46 states. One of those projects was a flax processing plant in Cornelius, Oregon.

Flax had become an essential war material. The United States military used it for coats, parachute harnesses, ropes, tarpaulins, fire hose, packing, and to cover the gliders used to transport troops into combat. Oregon’s Willamette Valley, it turned out, grew flax exceptionally well. When the government guaranteed the price of the crop at 58 cents a pound, acreage shot up across the valley. Processing plants were built to handle the harvest. At its wartime peak, fourteen flax plants operated throughout the Willamette Valley, and Oregon’s flax and linen production covered 18,000 acres. There were annual flax festivals and displays at the state fair. No part of the plant was wasted — seeds, fiber, and the woody core called shives all found uses in oil, fuel, fiberboard, linoleum, and cattle feed.

The Cornelius Plant

The Cornelius plant was constructed by the Defense Plant Corporation in 1943, on 135 acres purchased from Henry Herring, known at the time as the Morrissey farm. The Defense Plant Corporation approved $165,000 for construction and the contract was awarded to Ross Hammond Inc. of Portland for $84,000. The finished plant included four storage sheds, each 56 feet by 240 feet, an office building, a deseeding shed, a scutching building, fuel storage, a boiler building, and two sets of six retting tanks each. Wastewater from the retting tanks was stored in lagoons and discharged into the Tualatin River during high flow periods. The plant’s rated capacity was 2,400 to 3,000 short tons of pulled flax.

The Washington County Flax Growers Cooperative was formed to operate the plant, leasing it from the government. Albert Girod, a farmer from Salem and State Field Agent of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, was named manager. In 1943, 800 acres of flax had been seeded in Washington County, with a goal of 1,000 acres planned for 1944.

How Flax Became Fiber

Understanding why the Cornelius Flax Plant mattered requires understanding just how complicated it was to turn a field of flax into usable fiber. Oregon processors faced an average of eighteen months from the time harvested flax was delivered to when the end product could be marketed. That timeline, combined with the two full years from planting to finished product, meant that flax farming was not for the impatient or the undercapitalized.

The process comprised six major steps, each one labor intensive and unforgiving.

Pulling. Flax was not cut at harvest, it was pulled from the ground by the roots. The fiber in the flax stem extends all the way down, and pulling preserved those extra inches of length that meant stronger fiber and a better price. Cutting left valuable fiber behind in the stubble. The problem was that pulling one acre of flax by hand took an average laborer eight full days. A Canadian invention in the 1920s changed that considerably, a machine pulled by horse or tractor with a two-man crew could harvest a three-foot swath at roughly one acre per hour, but the work remained demanding.

Deseeding. After harvest, flax arrived at the plant in tied bundles twelve inches in diameter. Workers untied each bundle and passed the seed-bearing portion of the stalks through smooth rollers to crush the seed pods and free the seeds. The seeds were valuable: some went back into the ground for the next planting, the rest were sold to crushers who converted them into linseed oil and flaxseed meal. Nothing was wasted.

Retting. Once deseeded, the bundles were retied and submerged in large concrete tanks of eighty-degree water. Retting used micro-organisms to dissolve the natural pectins binding the fibers to the woody core of the plant. Each tank load soaked for six to eight days. Large timbers and heavy racks were placed over the top to keep the straw submerged. A crew of three men could empty and fill a tank in a single day. The wastewater from this process was what accumulated in the lagoons south of the Cornelius plant and drained into the Tualatin River during high water periods — and what attracted the mosquitoes that led to the 1945 DDT experiment described below.

Drying. Wet bundles came out of the retting tanks and went into nearby fields, where laborers leaned them upright against each other in formations called wigwams to dry. Depending on the weather, drying took three to fifteen days. The unpredictability of Willamette Valley summers made this stage a particular vulnerability of the Oregon industry. Once dry, the bundles were bound and collected for the next step.

Scutching. Back at the plant, the dried flax went through a scutching machine that mechanically separated the long line fibers from the woody portion of the straw. This was typically done in winter months when the moisture content of the straw was thought to be closer to optimum conditions.

Hackling. The final step was hackling, or combing, which drew the line fibers over pins to make them parallel and remove the short tangled fibers. This was done partly by hand at the processing plant and completed by machine at the spinning mills. Throughout every step, workers had to keep root ends even and prevent the straw from tangling, a requirement that made every handling of the bundles a careful and deliberate operation. Eighteen months of this, from delivered flax to marketable fiber.

The Workers

During the war years, the labor demands of flax processing collided with a severe shortage of workers. Men had joined the armed services or moved to higher-paying defense jobs in shipyards and factories. To keep the plants operating, many Oregon processors hired Hispanic migrant workers through the Bracero program, the wartime agreement between the United States and Mexico that brought hundreds of thousands of Mexican workers north to fill the labor gaps left by the war. Their contribution to Oregon’s wartime flax industry, like so much of the Bracero workers’ contribution to Pacific Northwest agriculture, deserves acknowledgment.

After the War

When the war ended, the flax industry collapsed almost as quickly as it had risen. Government price supports were withdrawn. European flax that had been stored during the war years flooded the market. The price dropped below 40 cents a pound. Synthetic fibers — nylon, rayon, and a newly strengthened cotton developed specifically to replace flax — took a substantial share of the remaining market. Farmers who had planted flax at the guaranteed wartime price of 58 cents a pound found themselves holding hundreds of tons of fiber with nowhere to sell it.

Oregon processors also failed to adopt grading standards necessary to market their product successfully. Willamette Valley flax was graded strictly on length rather than on the fiber’s texture, a limitation that hurt its competitiveness. And the long processing timeline — two full years from planting to finished product, eighteen months from delivery to marketable fiber — made adaptation to rapidly changing postwar markets nearly impossible.

By 1947 the Cornelius plant was declared war surplus and put up for auction. The Washington County Flax Growers purchased the land, plant and forty pieces of equipment for $27,753, a fraction of the $219,115 it had cost to build. They planned to continue operating, employing 30 to 60 workers.

The Fire

The end came on the night of January 6, 1949. Jim Zupo of Cornelius discovered the fire at about 11:30 in the evening. Fire departments from both Cornelius and Forest Grove arrived within minutes, but the intensity of the blaze in the wooden structure and the bone-dry flax contents within gave them little chance. It was January, cold and wet outside, but inside Storage Shed No. 4 the conditions were perfect for catastrophe. Within an hour the building had been completely consumed. The firefighters could do little more than prevent the flames from spreading to the rest of the plant.

Storage Shed No. 4 was one of four such structures built by the government in 1943 at a cost of $12,000 each. It measured 56 by 245 feet, frame construction with a concrete floor, and had been given new aluminum sheeting roofs since the flax growers purchased the plant in 1947. Inside were the entire 1948 crop and a portion of the 1947 crop, some 400 tons of deseeded flax straw and tow.

R. Glenn Ritchey, chairman of the Washington County Flax Growers Association, estimated the total loss at approximately $50,000. The shed was partly covered by insurance. The board of directors could make no announcement about reconstruction until a meeting of the association’s 74 members could be held.

No reconstruction was ever announced. The Cornelius Flax Plant shut down for good.

The first Oregon processing plant had already closed in 1945. By 1950 only three plants in the state were still operating. The last Oregon flax plant, near Canby, closed in the 1960s. The industry that had seemed poised to replace wheat at the top of Oregon’s agricultural economy was gone.

What Came After

The large buildings on Flax Plant Road did not sit empty for long. Over the following decades they served as agricultural storage, a filbert shell facility, a Nalley’s cucumber receiving station, a paper recycling operation, and in the 1960s as a blacktop plant operated by W.G. Bill Mauch Paving Company. Bill retired in 1969 and sold the plant at auction.

Two of the three large flax storage buildings and several of the smaller structures still stand today, in use by businesses along Flax Plant Road. One of the large buildings was torn down in 2020.

The Deal in the Lift

That is what brought me to Flax Plant Road in the winter of 2020, when my wife saw that one of the big buildings was coming down.

I drove over and found a salvage crew with the considerable job of dismantling the structure and recovering the lumber. They were on a tight schedule and not particularly interested in curious bystanders slowing them down. But once I explained my interest in the history of Cornelius and the building, I discovered they were interested in history too. Many of the buildings they dismantle for salvage have interesting pasts, and the people doing the work often want to know what those pasts were.

We made a deal. I would research the history of the Cornelius Flax Plant and deliver a report they could share with the buyer of the lumber. In exchange they would take me up in their lift for photographs and chainsaw a piece of timber from one of the big beams for me to keep.

A few weeks later I delivered the report. They cut me an eight-foot length of rough-sawn four by eight from one of the original 1943 beams. I plan to use it as a mantle in a future beach house. The rest of the lumber was shipped to a company in Yakima that uses it to construct rustic furniture.

Somewhere in a beach house that does not yet exist, a beam from the Cornelius Flax Plant will hold up a mantle. Built in 1943 on Solomon Emerick’s land, a mile south of Cornelius, where the Onward tied up on Thursday afternoons and where Charity Marsh taught the first students of Free Orchards in a log building lit by lard-greased muslin.

History has a way of ending up in unexpected places.