On February 4, 2002, transportation hub Everett Station opens to the public. The facility showcases artworks incorporated into the building, including a series of murals depicting stages of logging and lumbering painted by Northwest artist Kenneth Callahan (1905-1986) for the former Weyerhaeuser Mill B cafeteria in Everett in 1944.
Everett Station
On February 4, 2002, Everett Station officially opened as the city’s new multi-modal transportation center, bringing together Everett Transit bus service, Snohomish County Community Transit, regional Sound Transit, and Greyhound Lines in one location. Amtrak and Sound Transit train service arrived a few years later. The new facility also gave space for college classes, community meetings and city offices. The firm Zimmer Gunsul Frasca (ZGF Architects) designed the building with a brick and glass exterior and a copper roof. It is essentially two separate buildings joined by a four-story light-filled lobby and depot waiting area that features a glass atrium, staircase and clock, the artwork of Camano Island artist Jack Archibald.
Funding for the artworks came from the City of Everett’s percent for public art ordinance, managed by the Everett Cultural Commission. Qualifying projects can be works directly incorporated into a building project or ones that are permanently sited or mobile. The Archibald clock titled Millennial Chronometer was a major built-in feature but some of the most significant pieces added were not new but artwork with a history. Upon the station’s opening, Everett Herald reporter Ron Glowan wrote:
"The artistic coup is the restoration and installation of the 'Weyerhaeuser Murals,' oil on canvas paintings by famed Northwest artist Kenneth Callahan, that were created for the cafeteria of Weyerhaeuser Mill B in 1944. Shaped to fit over doors and windows, these narrow canvases chronicled the life cycle of the timber industry in broad, representational strokes of color, shape and form" ("Culture Pulls Into Station," 58).
Weyerhaeuser and Callahan
In April 1944 Weyerhaeuser’s newsletter the Cee and Bee announced: "Breaking like a sunset before the eyes of startled onlookers, 'The Forest Industry,' first painting ever made expressly for a sawmill, greeted customers at the Big W Cafeteria Monday morning April 3." This marked the completion of Callahan’s logging and lumbering murals installed in the Mill B cafeteria ("Mill Murals On the Move").
In 1944 Callahan’s national reputation as a prominent young painter of the Northwest School made him a good choice for the work. He had studio space at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM), where he worked as curator from 1937 to 1961. During summer months he worked as a fire lookout in the North Cascades. Callahan and his wife Margaret Callahan (1904-1961) had a small studio near Granite Falls where he painted the Mill B murals. Callahan had become interested in mural painting in the early 1930s and traveled to Mexico to meet muralists Diego Rivera (1886-1957) and Jose Orozco (1883-1949). Their powerful large-scale paintings impressed him, as well as their emphasis on the power of the working class. The Rivera "Detroit Industry" murals in the Detroit Institute of Art created in 1932-1933 could have been a direct influence. By the time of his Weyerhaeuser commission Callahan had already completed murals displayed in various regional locations, including one in Weyerhaeuser’s Tacoma office.
Weyerhaeuser Everett manager Linden N. Reichmann (1894-1977) commissioned the artist to paint murals for mill town Everett. Callahan was asked to portray the various stages of lumbering and logging. Callahan did so, representing workers pictured heroically as Paul Bunyan figures. This was a challenging project since the paintings needed to fit around windows, doors, and a curved roofline. One 4-foot by 8-foot panel depicted Mill B. Painting in the small Granite Falls studio meant that Callahan needed to make the murals in segments. He spent six months making color scale drawings and then another six months transferring the drawings to canvas. In all, the murals consisted of 18 pieces. The project took a year to complete. Upon installation, Weyerhaeuser claimed the murals to be the only artwork of its kind at that time placed in a sawmill setting. Mill B’s cafeteria was open to both workers and the general public.
Removal, Storage, Resurrection
Weyerhaeuser closed Mill B in 1979. It had opened in 1915 as the nation’s first all-electric mill. Wishing to preserve Callahan’s artwork, the company hired San Francisco art conservator James Pennuto in 1974 to clean, restore, and remove the murals, preparing them for storage. It took Pennuto 15 days to remove decades of dirt, grime, and smoke, restore damaged areas, protect the murals with a covering of Japanese rice paper, and then carefully ease them from the walls and roll them onto 12-inch diameter cardboard tubes.
The Weyerhaeuser Company supervised the preservation work and provided archival storage. A few of the pieces were framed for display at Weyerhaeuser facilities but the company held the majority in its archives. In 1992, 14 of the original 18 murals were given to the City of Everett. Plans for Everett’s multimodal transportation center gave a chance to once again display them.
Art conservator Peter Malarkey tackled the job of preparing and installing portions of the mural in Everett Station. First he unrolled the canvas portions and flattened them, and then removed the rice paper coverings. He also removed some remaining grime, as well as glue and wall material that had adhered to their backs. Abrasions and small tears were repaired, stabilized and painted and then aligned and glued to the walls. The last step was giving the murals a protective coat of varnish. In order to preserve their original appearance, Malarkey attempted to keep all of Callahan’s seams and repairs. Amazingly, by design or good fortune, the rooflines of both Mill B and Everett Station were similarly arched and easily accommodated two of the murals largest pieces. These were placed in the station’s multipurpose room on the fourth floor, its door openings designed to accommodate the murals. Other portions were added to wall niches on the second and third floors without need for alterations to the art.
Upon removal of the murals in 1974 Callahan remarked that he didn’t consider them to be his best work and that he wouldn’t want to be doing the same paintings now but added: "They were good things ... at any one time an artist does what he thinks is right. I’m not the least bit sorry I did them” ("Mill Murals Moving"). That same year Everett Herald reporter Jeanne Metzger summed up the importance of the murals as threefold. First, they leave an historic look at the lumber industry in the 1940s; second, they are an example of Callahan’s work; and third, they remain a testimony to Weyerhaeuser’s Everett Manager Linden Reichmann, who believed that an industrial setting could be a fitting place for art.
