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When this photograph was taken — 1922 — Rose Bussiere Peters was 18 years old, already with a world of experience in cookhouse work. Here she wears her chefs outfit at Camp 18 on Simpson Creek above Korbel.

“While I was waiting on tables at Camp 18, Joe Filgas said he needed a second cook. He asked me to try out for it, saying he would teach me - what a good teacher he was.”

“After I was there for almost a year the Bullcook, as he was called, said they needed a second cook at Korbel Cookhouse. There, I worked under Jack Gray, a wonderful cook from the Southern States.”

“That was a large cookhouse. It had a transient dining room for those going and coming from the mountain country and Trinity County. You could get a wonderful meal — all you could eat for $1 — served family style. Try and find that now!”

Rose Bussiere was born in late May of 1903 in the Scottsville area around Blue Lake. Her father was a donkey runner for the Northern Redwood Lumber Company at Camp 11 on the Mad River. It seemed natural to Rose that, at the age of sixteen, she too go to work for the Northern Redwood Lumber Company at Korbel.

With so many men occupied by the war efforts overseas in 1918, women were much needed in traditional men’s jobs. Rose first worked in the planing mill and later making shingles and shakes and was the last woman to leave the mill before being transferred to the cookhouse a year later.

The Northern Redwood Lumber Company was a prestigious and wealthy company at that time. After taking over the milling operations of the Bohemian Korbel brothers in 1913, they went on to transform a small company town into a larger community complete with resort hotel, company store, recreation hall, cookhouse, blacksmith shop and railroad depot. The company owned 35,000 acres of timber, eight miles of logging road, the Arcata and Mad River Railroad and the Nelson Steamship Company. The company kept an extensive dairy farm and cattle ranch, slaughterhouse, chicken and pigeon ranch, orchards and a large garden area for fresh vegetables. All this was necessary to feed the almost seven hundred men employed by the Northern Redwood Lumber Company.

Those rugged men turned out 50,000,000 feet annually of redwood and fir lumber from the one “1-band” and one “2-band” mills and the planing mill at Korbel. They manufactured silo and tank stock and pipe staves, lath, shingles, shakes and casket stock.’

The Korbel cookhouse was a large two-story building with rooms for the waitresses and cooks on the top floor and the kitchen and dining room below. Attached to the shady northside of the cookhouse was the meathouse, screened on three sides to keep the meat cool.

The Czechoslovakian head cook, Joe Filgas, Sr., conducted the cookhouse in an orderly manner according to his daily schedule. He insisted that the cookhouse be immaculate and Rose began her working day by mopping the dining room floors. The long tables then had to be set with plate down, saucer up and handle-less cup down, plus silverware and napkins.

The salt and pepper shakers, sugar dispenser, cream pitcher and catsup bottle had to be cleaned and filled every morning. Each group of condiments was referred to as a “round” and was shared between six men with six to eight “rounds” per table.

Each meal found Rose and the other waitresses serving 75 to 85 hungry men, plus any number of mountain travelers passing through. Every man had his place in the dining room and, in order to avoid fights. Rose often asked the mountain travelers to wait until the men were all seated before picking a vacant place.

Young Rose found the work of waitress hard. The thick, white dishes were heavy and the pace of the cookhouse was fast. The pay as a waitress was $45 per month plus room and board.

The second cook under Joe Filgas was his son, John. When John went on to be head cook at another camp up the river. Rose took his place as second cook. The starting pay was $75 per month.

The kitchen of the Korbel cookhouse was kept immaculate. There v/ere five ovens with one big firebox to tend. The ovens had an iron top for the range. The tops were cleaned with a burlap-covered brick which left no odors or grease. There was a long dish-out table covered with zinc to retain the heathttps://lostcoastoutpost.com/2025/nov/22/humboldt-history-every-day-feast-or-inside-kitchen/ where the waitresses picked up the filled platters and bowls of steaming food.

The food for the Korbel cookhouse came mainly from the Northern Redwood Lumber Company’s own ranch. There was always ample beef, occasionally ham or chicken, plenty of fresh fruit from the orchards, fresh vegetables in season and plenty of milk from the company’s Norton Ranch. The other food and ingredients were bought and kept in the cookhouse storeroom. There were wooden barrels of maple syrup, sacks of flour, sugar, rice, coffee, beans and salt, and boxes of macaroni and tea.

As second cook. Rose Bussiere began her working day in the kitchen at 4:00 a.m. The flour sack apron went on first thing. Before making breakfast, the day’s desserts were made. Cookies, pies and cakes were rotated throughout the week. Lunch, or dinner, as it was called in those days, for the choppers also had to be prepared before breakfast. These men worked too far out in the woods to come to the cookhouse for the noon meal. Their lunchboxes were fashioned from square five gallon oil cans with the tops cut off.

Breakfast consisted of rolled oats; pancakes made from starter of the previous day; bacon and either boiled or fried eggs; beef steak, fried potatoes and hot biscuits and fruit. The meal gong rang at 6:00 a.m. for the men in their cabins and at 7:00 a.m. the last gong rang for breakfast.

Dinner was at noon sharp and the 75 to 85 hungry men lined up outside the cookhouse doors and waited to eat roast meat of some kind, or boiled ham, baked or mashed potatoes, some kind of dried beans, a vegetable, either pie or pudding and hot doughnuts, if it was doughnut day.

Filling those hungry bodies at suppertime was sliced roast, stew, macaroni or rice, potatoes, fruit, fresh bread and dessert.

Behind the taste of all this delicious food was a lot of hard work. Rose rushed around during her working hours under the strict orders of Joe Filgas. She can remember sitting for two hours or more peeling one hundred pounds of potatoes and chopping twenty- five pounds of onions. Joe Filgas, with his sharp eagle eyes, was sure to criticize if the potato peelings were anything other than peelings. On bread baking day. Rose watched the five ovens after supper until 10:00 p.m.

As second cook, she was in charge of making doughnuts. The raised doughnuts were slid into a big vat of grease and Rose turned them with two long wooden sticks to keep from being splattered. After cooking, the doughnuts were coated with sugar. Rose turned out about nine dozen doughnuts four times a week.

The task of making three meals a day, seven days a week was a big one. Sometimes it seemed to Rose that all she did was stand in front of the ovens stirring for hours on end. Other times it would be shelling peas or kneading dough.

Life at the Korbel cookhouse was not all work, though. On the first full moon of June the seasonal Saturday night dances began at Camp Bauer. The dance platform was always crowded with couples , while the band played lively tunes continuously from 9:00 p.m. to 3:00 a.m. Rose rarely missed these dances and never lacked a dancing partner. Summer and fall Sundays at Korbel were genuine “days of rest.”

During many afternoon breaks and evening strolls. Rose taught English to her Finnish friend, Hilma Erickson. Hilma was a waitress at the cookhouse and the two young women had many a giggly time at these English lessons.

The work in the Korbel cookhouse proved too much for Rose Bussiere, a small and thin woman, and in early 1922 she moved to Eureka and took a job there. She had met Martin Peters at Korbel and they were married in 1922 after she had quit working at the cookhouse. Mrs. Peters now resides in Arcata and looks back upon those cookhouse years with fond memories. When reminiscing of those days. Rose recalls most vividly that, “everybody was happy and those were good times.”

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