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You are looking for a camoed plastic Peanut jar.
Elevation 1428.
Educate yourself and read the long description!
Who remembers those wonderful mornings, waking up to a sweet fragrance of rotten eggs?
The black ash fell from the sky blotting the sun and turning that new-car shine into a shallow imitation of a dirty sandbox.
You are standing in front of a prototype of a revamped Wigwam Burner. Jerry Lausmann left a memento of his life tucked into a corner near the Stewart Meadows Golf Course that he helped create.
Was the Rogue Valley becoming a Southern California clone, bathed daily in a swirl of thick, sulfuric clouds, the same kind of clouds that in 1962 London killed nearly 70 people?
If you were lucky enough to live in the Rogue Valley during the middle of the last century,(like me) you know what we're talking about.
Days filled with eye-irritating smoke that rivaled, and sometimes outdid, a smoggy commute on the Los Angeles freeway.
There were farmers burning fields and smoking orchards as automobiles belched lethal fumes, but the culprits catching the blame in Oregon were wigwams.
Wigwams, or teepees , burned wood waste, what was left over when lumber was cut--the chips, bark and slivers of trees that once seemed to have no practical use.
As early as 1963, the State Sanitary Authority, forerunner of the DEQ, had called for a phase-out of wigwams. By 1967, accused of foot-dragging its enforcement, the agency began to get tough.
New wigwams would require its approval, staff would target the most serious wigwam pollution, and intermittent burning in wigwams, the kind that produced the worst smoke and unburned particles, was banned.
If mill operators didn't clean up their smoke-belching wigwams voluntarily, the authority warned they would be subject to a mandatory shutdown in December 1968.
"There is intensive pressure on the burner operators," Said Jerry Lausmann, "demanding that they eliminate pollution, but no one has told the operators how this can be done in any practical sense."
Lausmann was part owner with his father of KOGAP Lumber Industries mill in Medford. "I have studied the burning processes in teepee burner for some time," Lausmann said. "I discovered a phenomena."
In a 14 page patent filing, filled with details of his scientific experimentation, Lausmann presented his solution--a system that eliminated smoke and particle fallout from lumber-mill wigwams.
He built a prototype of his invention and used it to test his theories at the Medford mill. After three years, he could show that his system eliminated all visible smoke and fallout as it burned seven tons of mill waste per hour.
"We've even spread clean white sheets on the ground downwind from our burner to see if any fallout shows up," he said. "And they stayed clean every time."
Lausmann said the equipment could be installed in most existing wigwam burners for a cost between $20,00- and $223,500.
Ironically, the first of the Lausmann Burners weren't installed in Oregon
Two months after Lausmann's patent was approved in November 1970, the Plum Creek Lumber Co., in Columbia, Mont., installed one burner and placed an order for three more.
The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality approved Lausmann's pollution-control component for the Spaulding and Son Lumber Mill in Grants Pass a year later.
Former Medford Mayor Jerry Lausmann passed away January 6, 2012, but no one should forget what the man did to give Southern Oregon a breath of fresh air.
Description taken from the Mail Tribune an
article written by Bill Miller.
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
Anqn.