A forgotten seven-minute film shot in Chewelah, Wash. in 1925 reveals the Evergreen State's role in supplying the nation with magnesite, a vital wartime mineral for defense production in both World Wars. /University of South Carolina), shot nearly a century ago in the Eastern Washington community of Chewelah, has been tucked away in an archive in South Carolina for nearly 50 years.
The site near Chewelah is called Finch Quarry. When the supply from Austria was cut off, Finch Quarry was already known for its magnesite because it had been a source of a form of marble used for tombstones and flooring and marble deposits are often found in the same areas as ore-bearing magnesite. “That coal and magnesite were stuck in the top end,” Ludwig explained. “And as this rotary kiln slowly turned, the rock would slowly come downhill to the end.”Geno Ludwig isn’t a geologist, and he never worked at the plant in Chewelah. He knows all about it, though, because he has a personal connection.
The magnesite plant made Chewelah boom from 1917 through the early 1920s and again during World War II, when as many as 800 people worked there. It was the kind of place that was in operation around the clock since the kilns took time to fire up . Vintage newspaper reports say that approximately 50 tons of magnesite were produced by each kiln per day; Geno Ludwig said as many as seven kilns were in operation at the Chewelah plant in its heyday.
“The businesses weren’t making as much money, the school districts didn’t have as many kids,” Ludwig continued. “So it was an economic disaster.” As to why the MIRC preserved that film at the University of South Carolina, the archivist Benjamin Singleton explains that back in 1980, the Fox Corporation donated something like 16 million feet of “outtakes” from newsreel footage created by their shooters from 1919 to the 1940s.
Singleton explained what it means when he says that the footage of Chewelah is “outtakes” – that is, if any footage of Chewelah were used in a finished newsreel, that footage would no longer be included in the outtake footage. It’s unclear if any Chewelah footage was included in a newsreel in 1925 or if the outtakes represent all that was shot there. Singleton says the Chewelah film was first made available online back in 2005 and that it’s never been licensed for any documentary production.