A worker from the 1930’s would feel right at home if he walked in today on a restoration project taking place at Cranberry Lake in Deception Pass State Park.

State Parks employees are making repairs the old fashioned way, using hand saws, bark spuds, chisels and draw knives. This is one construction site where the the buzz and whirr of modern power tools don’t disturb the tranquility.

“It does make for a bit more docile construction site,” said John C. Platz, owner of Pilgrims Progress Preservation Services, a private contractor from Boring, Oregon that the state hired to teach its workers how to repair old park structures.

Platz is no stranger to Whidbey Island. This summer his company was at Ebey’s Landing working on the old Ferry House and blockhouse with a University of Oregon crew. Pilgrims Progress works exclusively on restoration projects, and in teaching others to restore old buildings.

Undergoing renovation is the Cranberry Lake Community Kitchen Shelter, built around 1935 by the Civilian Conservation Corps. It’s a rustic treasure, featuring massive rock work, open beams and cedar shakes.

But in recent years it hasn’t been entirely authentic. Repairs done in the ‘70s included modern items, such as plywood beneath the shakes. All that has been ripped out and is being replace by shakes placed the old fashioned way.

As Platz described the project, several men were rolling a big Douglas fir log down the hill. At the bottom, they muscled it up on some sawhorses and started removing bark with a tool called a bark spud, and finished the job with dangerous-looking draw knives. The log would replace a rotted out support beam in the structure.

Under some trees not far away, Dan Ross and Dave Howat were preparing some rafter-tail replacement poles by arduously hand-sawing them to the proper length and “peelin’em down to size,” as Howat described it.

Ross works at Fort Flagler State Park and said the training would be useful when he returns to deal with its century-old buildings. “You’ve got to tear material apart without destroying it,” he said.

The Cranberry Lake project will last three weeks, during which three different State Parks crews will spend one week learning historic restoration techniques.

Karl Rosskopf, State Parks’ project construction manager, watched the proceedings with interest, and was pleased to see the old shelter regaining its historic look. “In the ‘70s they were just old buildings,” he said of structures built in the ‘30s and early ‘40s by the CCC and WPA crews. “But we’ve turned the corner; now they’re historic.” By restoring the structures with authentic tools and methods, “the character of the old building re-emerges,” he said.

Old photos were used to help plan the shelter’s restoration. Rosskopf said the ancient shakes with their “huge exposure” can’t be exactly duplicated, because trees of the size the shakes were made from are no longer around. But some impressive shakes were found by Pilgrims Progress, through a mill in Oregon that fishes old cedar logs out of cranberry bogs.

“It’s not something you just go to the lumber yard and order up,” Rosskopf said.

The skills learned at this training project will result in more authentic restoration of old structures throughout the state.