Navigating this site
Click or tap Each company name to go to an in depth history of that firm. Lots of photographs and illustrations. Lot's of history.
Note: the pictures at the top of this page are a 1900s Hewitt Lea Funck advertising postcard showing old growth timber and a picture of the interior of Pasquier Products in 2020.
The three companies and the Pasquier connection
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 throughout Seattle and naturally some in Sumner. One of HLF’s first employees was Emmanuel Pasquier.
The W. T. 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 also 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.
Click or Tap Each company name to go to an in depth history of that firm.
The Manufacturing Plant
Located on Puyallup Street in Sumner the plant has grown and changed considerably over the years, The distThe distinctive "sawtooth roof" building built in 1922 still exists, incorporated into other sections of the plant. A walk through the plant reveals that much of the construction is 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.
As one walks through the plant the air holds the scent that wood emits as it gives up it's shape to be made into other shapes. This would be familier 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 pe of visual tour of the plant in 2020.
Photographs and descriptions of the processing areas, the machinery and the products produced by that machinery.
