In 1914 the Hewett Lea Funck Company built a manufacturing and distribution plant in Sumner. Their product was ready made (prefabricated) homes and silos that were shipped by rail as "kits" to new home owners and farmers.
The HLF market was both national and local. They sold in the plains states where lumber was scarce. They also sold locally, their houses were popular in the UPS area of Tacoma and in Seattle and naturally in Sumner. One of HLF’s first employees was Emmanuel Pasquier.
The W. V. Young company was formed In 1933, when Willard Young bought the HLF company. During World War II, Young produced plywood parts for the “Duck” amphibious landing craft and components for Quonset Huts. Emmanuel Pasquier was his plant foreman.
In 1952 Mike Pasquier, along with his brother Charlie, bought the company. and in 1959 the name of the company was changed to Pasquier Panel Products. Emmanuel Pasquier still worked at the plant until retiring in 1964.
The Manufacturing Plant
Located on Puyallup Street in Sumner the plant grew and changed considerably over the years, The distinctive "sawtooth roof" building built in 1922 was incorporated into other newer sections of the plant. A recent walk through the plant before it was taken down revealed that much of the construction was wood. Massive wood ceiling beams and trusses, wood floors, catwalks and walls. That seems fitting, that forest timber be processed in a plant made largely from the forests of the past.
On the walk through the plant the air still held the scent that wood emits as it gives up it's shape to be made into other shapes. This would be familiar to anyone who has spent time working with wood in the forest or the workshop. The scent of sawdust with a hint of machine oil.
In the Pasquier portal of this website we have provided a type of visual tour of the plant. Photographs and discriptions of the processing areas, the machinery and the products produced by that machinery.
