Timberline Lodge: Four Hundred Workers, One Political Bargain

In nineteen thirty-six, the unemployment rate in some parts of Oregon was running above thirty percent. Franklin Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration needed projects that would put people to work and produce something visible, something that would last and demonstrate that federal investment in labor could build lasting value. Timberline Lodge was that demonstration.

Construction began in the summer of nineteen thirty-six at six thousand feet on the south flank of Mount Hood. Roughly four hundred workers were employed: ironworkers, carpenters, stonecutters, weavers, woodcarvers, muralists. Many were skilled craftspeople who had been unemployed for years. The government supplied the project; their hands supplied everything else.

What they made was extraordinary. The lodge's hand-forged iron hinges and hardware. The hand-woven textiles on the furniture and wall panels. The wood-carved newel posts featuring Northwest wildlife. The hand-painted murals depicting Oregon pioneer history and native flora. Together these form the most concentrated collection of Works Progress Administration decorative arts in the Pacific Northwest.

Roosevelt dedicated the lodge on September twenty-eighth, nineteen thirty-seven, the same day he dedicated the Bonneville Dam, approximately forty miles away. He gave a short speech in the rain.

Four decades later, Stanley Kubrick needed an exterior shot for a hotel in a horror film. He chose Timberline Lodge for the Overlook Hotel in "The Shining." The lodge's management made one request: please do not use Room Two Seventeen as the haunted room, because guests kept refusing to stay there. Kubrick agreed and changed it to Room Two Thirty-Seven, which does not exist at the real lodge. Guests still request Room Two Seventeen. It exists. It does not appear to be haunted.