I would like to mention that it involved quite a bit of manual labor, hauling, and other materials to be delivered from the road to the site of Watchman which must have been some four or 500 feet above the height of the road below. This entailed lumber, cement, and other building materials being hauled up the hill by animals and delivered to the site, and then the material was available to the workmen to build this building. The building is rustic stone. We could not use big stone on that building because of the danger. Since the building was not extensive in size we had to use smaller stones to get the proper foundation effect rather than to have boulders on the site which were not available. It was a difficult place to construct, but the ultimate result was a building that is well placed and has survived many years, 50 years of severe weather conditions. It has had good maintenance and upkeep and today it is still an important point of observation of the rim road. As I remember, we had a number of Italian masons from Portland, Oregon that did much work, not only on Watchman Tower, but they did a beautiful job on the stone work at Sinnott Memorial. I think we should be deeply indebted to those men for the hard work that they did on such a tedious job to result in such beautiful buildings.
Well, I would like to make a few comments about the problems involved at the Sinnott Memorial and also Watchman Tower. I remember quite vividly when the Sinnott Memorial construction started they erected a scaffolding about the proposed site on which they could do the construction of this Sinnott Memorial. They had erected timbered scaffolding around the site of the Sinnott Memorial, and frequently during the construction period, which was all done under very precarious conditions and difficult space to work in, the scaffolding on one or two occasions was not securely founded in the ground and some of the timbers broke. I remember one scaffolding that broke with on one on it, but had there been some workmen on the scaffolding it could have been a serious accident because all building material that broke away from this scaffolding slid down hundreds of feet into the clear lake, the Crater Lake waters below. I remember when they were building this scaffolding a number of the men, at least three or four, would have ropes tied around their waist line and be fastened from heavy posts placed in the ground up above. This was a precautionary measure to prevent possible injury. I do not remember any serious injuries taking place there, but I do recall of some of the materials on the platforms being accidentally lost and falling to the area below without any casualties. The construction of the job was very time consuming. And especially the masonry men out there, once they got the scaffolding built around the site, they too were very, very careful to watch each step they made and not to lose their balance and fall below and be involved in serious injury.
