The Old Cookhouse

Samoa Cookhouse

Cookhouse Dining Room

Enjoying Breakfast at the old Cookhouse

On our third day in Eureka we bicycled to the Samoa Peninsula (a long sandy stretch of land 9.5 miles long and one mile wide), the land barrier that separates northern Humboldt Bay from the Pacific Ocean.  Samoa was the site of a mill town and today the site of the last surviving mill cookhouse in the West – the cookhouse first opened in 1893.  The Samoa Cookhouse still serves breakfast, lunch, and dinner lumber camp style – a set menu with no limit on second’s.  We arrived for breakfast after biking across three bridges to the Peninsula, a scary adventure due to the narrow shoulder and fast moving traffic.  In the early 1900’s, mill workers could simply walk to the cookhouse from their adjacent company housing units.  “Come and get it” was the familiar cry heard at the Hammond Lumber Company cookhouse, a busy place crowded with hungry men.  Meals were served family style at long tables covered with oil cloth, ten men to a table.  The girls who worked at the cookhouse were required to reside in the upstairs dormitory in order to work seven days a week, providing three hot meals a day.  Each Thursday, everyone provided labor to clean the floors – the wooden floors got splintered and scarred by the calked (spiked) boots, trapping food and dirt.  The floors today are covered in linoleum.  Historic photographs from the old logging and cookhouse days adorn the walls, and relics from the era are displayed in several rooms.  Andrew Hammond purchased the Vance mill property in 1900 and continued buying timber land, expanding production facilities and size of the operation over 56 years, creating the nations largest redwood lumber mill.  Georgia Pacific Corporaton purchased the Samoa sawmill complex in 1956 and began operation of a plywood mill in 1958.  Some of the older worker housing was razed during construction of modern mill facilities but the Samoa Cookhouse was preserved. 

A Mighty Big Tree!

The Old Cookhouse

Lumberman's Calked Boots