World War II memorial moving to Crown Park

Georgia-Pacific donates memorial honoring local paper mill workers who died serving in WWII to the city of Camas

By Kelly Moyer
January 6, 2022 10:59 am
Latest News, Life, News

Ryan Hickey, operations specialist with the city of Camas, shows in August 2019 where damage had previously been located on a memorial for Camas mill workers who died serving in World War II. (Contributed photo courtesy of The Columbian files)

Camas’ Crown Park will soon showcase a memorial honoring 22 Camas paper mill employees who lost their lives serving in the armed forces during World War II.

Installed by the Crown Zellerbach Corporation in 1947, the veterans memorial has lived off the corner of Northeast Sixth Avenue and Northeast Division Street, across from the paper mill, for nearly 75 years.

Now, the memorial is slated to move a few blocks north, up Division Street, to its new permanent home inside Crown Park.

Camas Parks and Recreation Director Trang Lam said the mill’s current owner, Georgia-Pacific (GP), recently offered to donate the memorial to the city.

“The mill has a long history of donations to the city. As GP prepares to dispose of this particular parcel of property, they wanted to ensure the monument continues to have a home,” Lam said.

Moving the memorial to Crown Park made sense considering the park’s history, Lam said, adding: “Crown park was also donated to the city by the mill, so it was a fitting new home for this memorial, tying the long history between the city and the mill.”

With a Crown Park revamp in the works, Lam recommended to Camas Parks and Recreation Commission members in early December that the city move the memorial sooner rather than later, “before the park gets redeveloped, so folks can visit it now.”

Lam pitched two site options to the parks commission on Dec. 8: Option A, located near the corner of Northeast Division Street and Northeast 15th Avenue, and Option B, near the park’s entrance off Northeast Everett Street and Northeast 17th Avenue.

The first option, near the park’s southwest corner, would place the memorial close to an existing monument that pays tribute to the Crown Willamette Paper Company’s donation of Crown Park to the citizens of Camas on Dec. 14, 1934.

Some commission members believed Option B was too close to a large, grassy field where people gather for soccer matches, Easter egg hunts and other annual events.

“That field is really highly used,” said commission member Katy Daane. “I don’t know what the ultimate plan is in the master plan for that, but that field is definitely well-used, so I think Option A might be a better fit. I do like that it’s adjacent to the other memorial there, which creates a nice, serene corner.”

Commission member Ellen Burton, the city’s former interim mayor, said she also felt Option A would be a nice location for the memorial.

“It could be a really special place and could be landscaped to reflect the importance of the monuments and what they mean for the families,” Burton said.

Parks commission member Cassi Marshall, who also serves as the president of the Port of Camas-Washougal’s board of commissioners, agreed.

“I like the two monuments together,” Marshall said. “There’s a nice mill connection to that … and that (corner of the park) has a nice, reflective feel … It’s just a really nice place. And I’m sure it will change, but right now it is really underutilized. This (would be) a nice draw to get people into that part of the park, to enjoy how serene that part of the park is.”

In the end, the parks commissioners agreed Option A was the better option, and voted unanimously to place the monument near the corner of Division and 15th. The commissioners also instructed staff to look into raising the monument up onto a piece of concrete to make the plaque honoring World War II veterans and millworkers more visible to passersby.

“Now that we have solidified the new location for the monument, the next step is to work through the specific details to determine how and when the monument gets moved,” Lam told The Post-Record in mid-December.

Related Stories