Antique Powerland Steam Sawmill

This is a steam-powered sawmill at the Antique Powerland museum complex in Brooks, Oregon, my “Work” entry for the World Wide Panorama project.

(Click here to view the interactive picture in a new tab. When it opens, click and drag to look around.)

Antique Powerland is a group of museums sharing a large parcel of land, each dedicated to a different aspect of antique machinery, farm equipment, cars, trucks, and related items. The museums generally have an associated club or association. There are about 15 different participants, but the charter group is the Western Steam Fiends Association (WSFA). The group started in 1952, and in 1970 purchased the property that would become the Antique Powerland Museum Association. Today, they continue to preserve and demonstrate a variety of steam-powered equipment.

One of the items built and maintained by the WSFA is a steam-powered saw mill.

The sawmill is a historical reproduction of a steam powered mill of the 1900-1930 period. Originally built from components taken from two separate local sawmills (one in Gervais, and one in Harrisburg), it has been reconstructed once to result in the current condition. The sawmill is powered by a steam engine from the same time period, and demonstrations are given.

This picture represents “work” in two different ways. First, the sawmill itself obviously represents a type of work common in the area at one time. Work as employment, doing something for pay, is a central meaning.

But the broader scope of the museum also speaks to the nature of work in a different sense. From a physics standpoint, work is force applied over a distance. This museum, with a central focus being on motors, also highlights that aspect of work.

Photography Notes

This was taken as a bracketed series, in order to get the outside to be exposed reasonably. Because of the amount of glare, I wanted to do more than just mask, so I used Photomatix Pro to do HDR processing. The nadir was done by taking a picture off to the side, and using PTGui’s viewpoint correction feature to blend it in. I think it worked well. It was easier taking the picture, but harder doing the processing.

Although the resulting picture seems a little dim, it accurately captures the sense of the building interior during a hot, sunny day.