Bagby Guard Station

About this property

Bagby Guard Station is a rustic cabin located in the Mount Hood National Forest in western Oregon, United States. It is adjacent to Bagby Hot Springs. The guard station was originally built to house fire crews assigned to patrol the surrounding National Forest. The Bagby Guard Station is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In the 1920s and 1930s, National Forest road networks were underdeveloped. Forest Service employees often traveled many miles on foot or horseback to reach job sites, carrying all necessary equipment for fieldwork. This made daily commutes impractical. To facilitate work at remote sites, the Forest Service strategically placed guard stations throughout the forest to support fire patrols and project crews. After World War II, the Forest Service greatly expanded its road network, allowing employees to get to most National Forest areas within a few hours. As a result, guard stations lost their utility. The Forest Service found new uses for some stations, but most were demolished or abandon. The Bagby Guard Station is located in the Mount Hood National Forest forty miles southeast of Estacada, Oregon, just outside the boundary of Bull of the Woods Wilderness area. It was built next to Bagby Hot Springs in 1913 by Phillip F. Putz, the Forest Service guard assigned to the area. Putz also built a small storage shed adjacent to the cabin. In the years following its construction, the guard station was used as a barracks for Forest Service fire crews that patrolled the surrounding forest during the summer fire season. In 1925 Putz built his own home in Colton, Oregon. During the 1920s, summer fire crews built a barn, dam, bathhouse, and additional shelters at the site. However, all of these facilities are now gone. Over time, the original guard station fell into disrepair so the Forest Service built a new cabin for the Bagby guard in 1974. Because of its rustic architecture and the cabin's unique historic value as an early Forest Service guard station, it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1999. In 2006, volunteers from Northwest Forest Conservancy and Friends of Bagby worked with the Forest Service to repair and preserve the original Bagby Guard Station cabin. The Bagby Guard Station is located in a remote area of the Clackamas Ranger District on the western slope of the Cascade Mountains, at 2,272 feet (693 m) elevation. It is a rustic cabin surrounded by undisturbed old-growth forest of mainly Douglas-fir, western hemlock, and western red cedar. The guard station is a traditional log cabin structure with a wood shingle roof and a stone foundation. It has a single room measuring 24 by 16 feet (4.9 m). The logs were cut and peeled on the site so the cabin blends into the surrounding forest landscape. The original shed still sits next to the guard station cabin. Both historic structures were renovated in 2006. However, they are not open to the public.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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