History, Historic House
Every large or small logging or mill operation in the redwood country had a cookhouse. It was the hub of life in the temporary community, if it was in the woods. If it was located in a substantial settlement, it served as a "community center". If the cookhouse was set up to serve fifteen or twenty men in a shingle bolt camp, often a woman and her husband, with a helper or two called bullcooks, flunkeys or cookees, handled the cooking and serving. If the boarders numbered in the hundreds, a staff of dozens of men and women carried the demands of the task. "Come and get it!" was a familiar cry heard by millmen and brawney-armed longshoremen at the Hammond Lumber Company cookhouse - now the Louisiana-Pacific Samoa Cookhouse - at the beginning of the century.