World War II memorial moving to Crown Park

Camas’ Crown Park will soon showcase a memorial honoring 22 Camas paper mill employees who lost their lives serving in the armed forces during World War II.

Installed by the Crown Zellerbach Corporation in 1947, the veterans memorial has lived off the corner of Northeast Sixth Avenue and Northeast Division Street, across from the paper mill, for nearly 75 years.

Now, the memorial is slated to move a few blocks north, up Division Street, to its new permanent home inside Crown Park.

Camas Parks and Recreation Director Trang Lam said the mill’s current owner, Georgia-Pacific (GP), recently offered to donate the memorial to the city.

“The mill has a long history of donations to the city. As GP prepares to dispose of this particular parcel of property, they wanted to ensure the monument continues to have a home,” Lam said.

Moving the memorial to Crown Park made sense considering the park’s history, Lam said, adding: “Crown park was also donated to the city by the mill, so it was a fitting new home for this memorial, tying the long history between the city and the mill.”

With a Crown Park revamp in the works, Lam recommended to Camas Parks and Recreation Commission members in early December that the city move the memorial sooner rather than later, “before the park gets redeveloped, so folks can visit it now.”

Lam pitched two site options to the parks commission on Dec. 8: Option A, located near the corner of Northeast Division Street and Northeast 15th Avenue, and Option B, near the park’s entrance off Northeast Everett Street and Northeast 17th Avenue.

The first option, near the park’s southwest corner, would place the memorial close to an existing monument that pays tribute to the Crown Willamette Paper Company’s donation of Crown Park to the citizens of Camas on Dec. 14, 1934.

Some commission members believed Option B was too close to a large, grassy field where people gather for soccer matches, Easter egg hunts and other annual events.