Sisters Log Home builds McMinnville chapel

A piece of Sisters Country will soon rise on the grounds of the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum Campus in McMinnville.

Hoffmann Construction Co. of Portland is building the 5,500-square-foot Evergreen Chapel on the McMinnville campus (home of the Spruce Goose), and the firm tapped Sisters Log Home Co. (SLH) of Sisters to build the log structure. The chapel will be the site of weddings and private events.

David Garske of Hoffman Construction Co. told The Nugget that the company searched the Pacific Northwest for a qualified log structure manufacturer and found Sisters Log Home to be the ideal fit.

"We had access to the logs - nobody else did," said David Wooderson of Sisters Log Home Co. "They're big logs; some of them are 45 feet long."

The logs are Douglas fir in the 14-to-20-inch diameter range.

It's not just access to materials that made the chapel a challenge.

"It's a very, very unique structure," Garske said, featuring a 65-foot-tall steeple. That's an engineering challenge, Garske said, since "log structures, between shrinkage and crush, like to move."

The steeple is being built separately and the SLH log structure will be fitted with it on site.

There is also 1,200 feet of ridgepole and purlins and 10 trusses. It all combines to make for a large structure - "the biggest one I've had in 15 years," Wooderson said.

The structure is being constructed at the nine-acre SLH site east of town. Each piece of the structure is tagged and color-coded. Then it will be broken down, shipped to McMinnville, and reconstructed on site by Wooderson's crew.

"We follow it," he said.

Garske said that the chapel was ordered by Delford Smith through the Michael King Smith Foundation. The whole campus is dedicated "to inspire and educate, to promote and preserve aviation and space history, and to honor the patriotic service of our veterans." According to Garske, "the chapel will fall into that mission."

The log shell will ship by the end of this month and construction will be completed this spring.

"They'll have their first wedding in June 2013," Garske said.

The project has been a welcome shot in the arm for Sisters Log Home, which, like virtually everyone in the construction industry, has lived through some lean times.

"I did have two employees for the last four-five years, pretty much," said Wooderson.

"It's been a long five years. Now there's logs on the whole nine acres."

And there are nine craftsmen working non-stop on the project.

"The quality that they're performing right now has been fantastic," Garske said.

Along with the obvious economic benefits of a big project, Sisters Log Home has the pride of partnership on a project that Garske says is "very, very unique and something special for

Oregon."

For more information visit www.evergreenmuseum.org.

Author Bio

Jim Cornelius, Editor in Chief

Jim Cornelius is editor in chief of The Nugget and author of “Warriors of the Wildlands: True Tales of the Frontier Partisans.” A history buff, he explores frontier history across three centuries and several continents on his podcast, The Frontier Partisans. For more information visit www.frontierpartisans.com.

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