Valsetz: Cycles Interrupted

 In previous ghost posts, I’ve mentioned my conviction that most abandoned settlements come about through the profit motive running up against ecological limits. One of the most tragic examples of this process is the story of Valsetz, the Coast Range village once known as the rainiest place in America. Only a few foundations remain at the remote townsite today, but for a brief period in the 1980s, Valsetz was a household name throughout the Northwest’s logging communities. This ghost town didn’t die through negligence or accident. It was deliberately destroyed.

Foundations and tree farms at the site of Valsetz.

Valsetz, Polk County, OR
Est. 1919, abandoned 1984

At the dawn of the twentieth century, the timber industry was booming. Hundreds of speculators, fresh from clearcutting the Great Lakes region, acquired chunks of Pacific Northwest land at knock-down prices and began hacking their way into the seemingly inexhaustible old-growth forests. In the 1910s, one of these outfits, the Cobbs & Mitchell Company of Cadillac, Michigan, manage to get their hands on an enormous area of wildfire-stricken trees deep in the Coast Range. Its owners knew they had to harvest the timber quickly before rot set in. This was before the widespread adoption of gas-powered trucks and chainsaws: these trees had to be felled by backbreaking work with crosscuts, hauled down the slopes by an engine known as a “steam donkey,” and shipped down to the mill by private railroad. Logging any new areas required the construction of miles upon miles of railroad track – a challenging feat I mentioned in my article on Bridal Veil.

This particular railroad, opened in 1917, split from the main line at Independence, a hop-growing hub on the banks of the Willamette. It wound its way through west through the farmlands of Polk County and then plunged deep into the forest, eventually coming to a halt thirty-nine muddy, winding miles later on the mountains’ western slope, in a flat-bottomed dell along the South Fork Siletz River. The rail line was called the Valley and Siletz: a prosaic name describing its course from Oregon’s breadbasket to the coast-bound stream. When the company built its terminus station in 1919, they shortened the title to a snappy corporate contraction.

Valsetz was linked to the outside world only by the railroad and by a rough track to Falls City cut by early settler O. A. Fanno, whose donation land claim adjoined the site. Even by the standards of turn-of-the-century Oregon, it was isolated. Cobbs & Mitchell’s workers and their families found themselves surrounded by millions of acres of dense old-growth. The hillsides around them were covered in five-hundred-year-old Douglas-fir and hemlock with trunks up to nine feet across, garlanded with mosses, fed by the decaying trunks of even older trees and by tiny mountain streams veiled in ferns, salmonberry and salal. It was an ancient ecosystem. Unlike the meadows of the Willamette Valley, which were created by the Kalapuyan peoples through controlled burns, this area was mostly unaltered by its human visitors: the coastal Siletz nation, who used it as a hunting ground. Natural fires would occasionally sweep through the underbrush, thinning smaller and unhealthier trees. Windstorms would sometimes topple the giants, leaving gaps for new growth to reach the sun. It was a place of constant change, constant death and new life, but the cycle was never broken.

One tree feeds another in a patch of uncut forest near Valsetz.

Until now. Cobbs & Mitchell’s men set to work felling trees and shipping them down the line. In 1922, they dammed the South Fork Siletz, creating a small lake for use as a mill pond. A sawmill went up on the shore and they began to fill the pond with old-growth logs.

There was work aplenty, and conditions were better than they’d been in the earliest days of the lumber industry. Company towns definitely had a whiff of serfdom about them, but at the time, places like Valsetz were a great improvement for workers and their families. Before the establishment of permanent lumber communities, loggers had been itinerant seasonal laborers; they spent the harvest season living in backwoods encampments – primitive at best, hellish at worst. One observer of the camps described them consisting of “crowded bunkhouses, wooden bunks in tiers, dirty straw, vermin, wet clothes steaming and stinking about the central stove, men pigging together without ventilation, privacy or means of cleanliness.” Vernon Jensen, a historian of the industry, described the nineteenth-century logger as “the homeless, womanless, voteless, migratory worker in the West.”

At least the company town was clean. Early newspaper accounts appreciatively noted the ubiquitous electricity and running water, and the “white linen” and “chambermaid service” offered to residents. Single workers lived in a bunkhouse, three to a room, but families could have a home of their own, and there was a school for the children. The endless forests were an endless playground both for kids and adults.

Mentions of Valsetz in the Independence newspaper’s society pages speak to a close, almost comically quaint community. Residents held fundraiser dances to improve the road to Falls City. (They referred to the mountain spur between their valley and the outside world as “the Hill” – strong Hobbit vibes.) Seventeen-year-old schoolteacher Carmen Daniel made the town proud when she was selected the 4-H “champion club girl of the United States,” winning seventeen head of Holstein cattle and an audience with President Coolidge. In later years, old-timers recalled frequent brawls between the loggers and the millworkers – sometimes bloody affairs involving their caulked (spiked) boots, but always ending with reconciliation. In such a remote place, where people are so reliant on their neighbors, it doesn’t make sense to hold a grudge.

By the late 1920s, there were about five hundred people living in Valsetz. Then the Depression brought almost total collapse. In 1931, Cobbs & Mitchell idled the mill. Not only had the big building employed everyone in town, it had also provided the electricity. The thirty-odd people who remained in the silent valley lit their homes with oil lamps. This state of affairs didn’t last long, though, and production picked back up by the end of the decade and jumped to new heights during the war.

I found this Cobbs & Mitchell ad really funny and I thought you might, too. (Source: University of Oregon Historic Oregon Newspapers.)

Already known as the wettest spot in the continental United States – Valsetz averaged 129 inches of rain per year, and over one period of twelve months in 1973-1974 received a record-breaking 191 inches – the town won additional national fame in the 1930s when nine-year-old Dorothy Anne Hobson started her own handwritten newspaper, the Valsetz Star. Hobson’s prose was witty, precocious, and extremely partisan: “We believe in hemlock, fir, kindness and Republicans,” she wrote in one issue. Cobbs & Mitchell executive Herbert Templeton would bring each issue to his office in Portland, type it up and mimeograph it, and mail it out to a loyal readership that included Herbert Hoover as well as Franklin D. and Eleanor Roosevelt. The quotations from the paper I’ve found online are pretty funny (“Things to be thankful for this Thanksgiving day: That our living room leaks in one corner instead of all over. That the new truck road didn’t slide into the pond. That they have snow in Seattle instead of here.”) and I might just have to get my hands on the complete run, which is available as a book.

The war brought boatloads of money into timber communities, and the efforts of the International Woodworkers of America union helped it stay there. The days of the fleabag lumber camp were over. Loggers and millworkers now lived in stable communities with families, commuted to the woods or the mill the way another man might to an office, and even owned their own homes.

In fact, by the late 1940s, Valsetz was becoming something of a relic: one of the last outright corporate fiefdoms. After the war, Cobbs & Mitchell spun off their Valsetz operation, transferring the town, mill, and surrounding forest to Herbert Templeton. While I found no record of overt discontent with Templeton’s rule, the townsfolk did have to tiptoe around his personal moralizing. A strict teetotaler, he refused to sell alcohol at the company store, and the clerks had to hide the racy magazines when he came to visit. Beer and liquor had to be brought in from the outside. Many Valsetz dwellers also evaded the high prices at the store by having their groceries delivered over the Hill from Dallas.

The town’s population peaked at around a thousand in the mid-twentieth century, making Valsetz significantly larger than most of the ghost towns of the Northwest. It had its own school district and its own zip code – 97393, in case you were curious. In 1948, residents replaced some of the older buildings with a community center that contained a store, café, social hall and two-lane bowling alley. Television and home telephones arrived in the mid-fifties, lessening the town’s isolation, and in 1968 the road to Falls City was finally smoothed and graded until it was passable by most cars. (It still is; the track only gets rough further west of the townsite.)

Technological change came to the mill, too. In 1957, Templeton switched his business plan away from producing structural lumber, and the Valsetz mill began turning out veneer instead. Veneer is the trade name for the thin layers that are glued together – grain across grain – to make plywood. At the time, the Northwest had a strong competitive advantage in veneer. It was produced by placing a blade horizontally against a log and rotating the log, peeling off the wood in long sheets. The bigger the trunk, the more veneer could be made from the tree, so colossal old-growth Douglas-firs were the perfect raw material.

Unfortunately, few of those giant trees remained in the hills around Valsetz. More and more, the town was surrounded by shrubby clearcuts and dense stands of monocultural plantation forest. Like every other lumber company, the town’s successive owners mowed down the old-growth faster than it could be replenished – let alone grow back into the thriving climax ecosystem it had once been. Boise Cascade, the conglomerate that purchased the Valsetz basin from Herbert Templeton in 1959, had a policy of replanting every clearcut acre with exactly 400 Douglas-fir seedlings. The result was hillsides covered in evenly sized, impenetrable thickets of trees, devoid of mosses or underbrush or any of the variety and vitality so present in old-growth. This was, and still is, standard industry practice on private land, and the US Forest Service isn’t much better. Today, after over a century of industrial forestry, less than ten percent of Oregon’s old-growth remains. Much of the Northwest is covered not in a naturally occurring ecosystem but by the type of plantation forest that surrounds the site of Valsetz. It’s an eerie simulacrum of the wild world, living but totally manmade, and walking or driving through it always raises the hairs on my neck.

Clearcut and plantation forest on the Hill today.

These second-growth trees are harvested when they are about 30 to 50 years old – tall, but skinny, and once referred to as “pecker poles” by the old-timers who remembered the giants. The clearcut is then planted with another generation of Douglas-fir, sprayed with herbicides to shut down competition from any other plants, and left to grow a third crop. With each successive generation of immature trees harvested and replaced, the ground is stripped of the nutrients normally recycled into the forest by the natural processes of decay. Soil erodes under the heavy winter rains, muddying streams and destroying salmon runs.

All of us need wood and paper. There will always be a need for logging in the Northwest. But industrial forestry as it’s practiced today is ugly stuff – and despite lumber companies’ claims to be good stewards of the land, it’s anything but sustainable. As the people of Valsetz soon found out, a system that destroys natural communities is happy to destroy human communities, too.

Beginning in the 1970s, the Northwest lost its competitive edge in the timber trade. The disappearance of the old-growth trees was accompanied by the invention of particle board (which could be made from small trees and wood scraps), which meant that peeled veneer was no longer as valuable as it once was. The practices of the lumber companies began to change, too. In the postwar years, Oregon loggers and millworkers had enjoyed comfortable wages and a high standard of living, thanks chiefly to the work of the International Woodworkers of America. The IWA had failed to organize workers in the Southern yellow pine belt, however, and employers spotted an opportunity to save money. Throughout the 70s, Northwest lumber companies purchased vast holdings in the South and began to move their mills down there, where the pliant workforce would accept much lower wages and poorer conditions. Others moved mill work overseas to Japan, keeping on only a skeleton crew of loggers in Oregon to load raw lumber onto ships bound across the Pacific.

(It’s worth noting that the South has always been an Achilles heel for organized labor. Racism on the part of white workers there frequently defeated efforts at working-class collaboration, while conservative governors used fears of “Communist integrationists” to pass union-busting right-to-work laws. The ripple effects of Jim Crow can be seen everywhere in America.)

Oregon still produces millions of board feet of lumber every year. Employment in the industry, however, peaked in 1978. Immediately thereafter, the Volcker shock – high interest rates leading to recession – caused demand for wood products to nosedive. The logging communities of Oregon and Washington were plunged into a depression from which many were never to recover.

Production in Valsetz had already begun to slow. In 1978, the railroad that had provided the town with its name had been pulled up and scrapped. The mill was shipping smaller and smaller quantities of veneer, and Boise Cascade could handle what was left with their truck fleet. The population fell as more workers and their families chose to live in larger towns over the Hill and commute in. By the 1980s, there were only about 200 people still living there. It was by no means a dying community, though, and the café still did a steady trade even if the bowling alley was closed for lack of business. In 1983, the varsity football team made it to the final round of the state championship. Although the people of Valsetz didn’t know it, it was their swan song.

I believe this was once the Valley & Siletz right-of-way. After the railroad was decommissioned, it was used as a truck route (since it ran straight to the mill); it’s recently been dug up, presumably to discourage tourists from speeding around the townsite.

On December 12^th, 1983, millworkers were gathered into the lunchroom by three representatives from Boise Cascade. One stepped forward and read out a letter:

We have recently completed an audit evaluation of the projected market for plywood and veneer and the Valsetz operation in particular. I am sorry to report that the short- and long-term market projections for the Valsetz operation are not favorable. As a result, the company plans to permanently close all operations at Valsetz on February 24^th, 1984. In addition, the townsite will be permanently closed following the end of the current school year.

I am sorry that the results of our evaluation do not warrant continued operation of the Valsetz operation. However, I want you to know that your efforts over the years have been genuinely appreciated.

All buildings on the site – veneer mill, homes, school, everything – were to be razed, the ground turned over, and the site planted with Douglas-fir. Valsetz was no longer worth the money for Boise Cascade to maintain; it would only be profitable as part of the tree farm. The first home was demolished a week later.

Anger was largely drowned out by sorrow and disappointment. Most people interviewed about their town’s impending destruction claimed to understand Boise Cascade’s economic rationale for closing the mill; it was the idea of outright eradicating the town that raised tempers. The abrupt termination of everyone’s livelihood combined with their eviction violated the implicit social contract that had dominated the company town since 1919. “We didn’t work with Boise like they were a company,” said school librarian Arlene Jeske. “They were like our father and everything we got, we got from them. Everything we did, we did for them. I think they should have treated us with as much respect as we tried to give them. They didn’t.”

Word of the oncoming doom spread quickly in the tense atmosphere of 1980s Oregon. Valsetz wasn’t the first timber town to be eradicated and replanted: Kinzua, in the dry ponderosa forests of the Ochocos, had suffered the same fate in 1978, just at the industry’s zenith. In the depths of the depression, though, the news now chilled rural Oregonians to their bones. Although few people still lived in company-owned housing, many small communities were completely dependent on a single lumber mill. Would their town be next?

Valsetz became a political totem in the burgeoning political conflict over old-growth logging. In Mill City on the other side of the Willamette Valley, both advocates and opponents of the planned timber sales along Opal Creek claimed that the story proved their point. Workers there said it showed that the mills had to be kept going at any cost, while ecowarrior George Atiyeh said it indicated that the old way of life was doomed and no amount of last-ditch liquidation would save timber jobs. (More on Mill City and Opal Creek in future blog posts.) The story ignited fear and curiosity all across the region. And many of the curious came up over the Hill to see Valsetz for themselves.

In its final months, the company town hummed with new activity. Antiques purchasers, real estate agents, and movers came to do business. Reporters crowded the café, to the point where one local kid put out a sign on his lawn reading “Valsetz Zoo, please don’t feed the animals.” They cornered locals for interviews and asked them to pose for photos with demolished buildings. Eschewing such drive-by sensationalism, the Oregonian’s star reporter Tom Hallman Jr. and photographer Randy Wood moved to Valsetz outright and spent most of its final six months getting to know the residents. Their award-winning epitaph for the community, included as a special supplement to the July 1^st Sunday edition, is well worth a read; it’s one of my primary sources for this article.

At first, the houses were pulled down where they stood and the rubble set on fire. Since the demolition was taking place in the order houses were abandoned, however, this meant that still-inhabited homes were smoked out by the pyres of their neighbors’ houses. People complained to the state Department of Environmental Quality, and Boise Cascade eventually decreed that the houses be torn apart and dragged to a slash pile instead. The demolition was carried out by a crew of Valsetz residents, hired to take apart their own town with the logging equipment they’d once used on the job. Nobody blamed the men who took the offer – finding work was going to be difficult for everyone. Most people in Valsetz were too young to retire and too old to retrain, and now had to compete with the thousands of other unemployed timber workers across the region for the few jobs remaining in the industry.

One of the starkest illustrations in the Oregonian’s supplement. (Source: Multnomah County Library.)

On March 26^th, Boise Cascade stripped everything valuable out of the mill, drove the log trucks down to their office in Monmouth, and torched the empty building. The post office closed, and the USPS struck 97393 from their list of zip codes. (Stamp collectors wrote in droves, requesting replies so that they could receive the special last-day postmark.) On May 24^th, the last class of Valsetz High seniors graduated; the valedictorian urged everyone to look to their future, not their past. The school had been the last thing keeping people there, and now the final exodus began. Everyone’s leases expired on May 31^st. By midsummer, the only people remaining in town were the members of the demolition crew, living in trailers as they finished their work.

The school was carefully dismantled rather than smashed up. Built less than a decade earlier and still in good condition, it had been purchased by a religious group in Salem, who moved and reconstructed it; it still stands today, housing the New Hope Foursquare Church. The Valsetz School District, on the other hand, was harder to dispose of. In February, Polk County had tried to forcibly merge it with the Falls City School District in preparation for the closure of the town, but residents collected enough signatures to force the issue to referendum, then voted against the merger. Instead, they tried to convert the district’s remaining assets into a year’s severance pay for the teachers and a college scholarship fund for the displaced kids. Shockingly, the Falls City School District and Boise Cascade actually sued to shut the idea down. Both wanted the leftover money for themselves: Falls City for its own schools, Boise Cascade as a property tax refund. (As virtually the only property owner in the district, Boise Cascade indirectly provided the school budget via its taxes.) I haven’t been able to find out who won, but it certainly says something about how much the company “genuinely appreciated” their employees. Immediately after evicting them, it brought them to court in order to wring out some extra cash.

Replanting began in the autumn. In December 1984, a year after the mill closure had been announced, the Oregonian’s Tom Hallman Jr. returned to Valsetz. He found one house left in a barren clearing on the shores of the artificial lake. Boise Cascade’s equipment shop was still standing, and a couple from Dallas had been hired to keep it safe from thieves and vandals. Terry and Wilma Murray, along with their two horses, two dogs, three cats and six geese, would be the last residents of Valsetz. In an interview, Terry echoed his predecessors’ fatalism:

I hated to see the place go, but what else could be done? I have some good memories of the place, and I feel sad to think it’s gone. I remember where all the buildings were, but sometimes when I’m out walking I almost feel lost. I don’t know about spirits or anything like that, but when I close my eyes I can almost see people walking around town. We’re definitely alone up here, but sometimes I can almost feel the presence of the old-timers.

The shop vanished soon afterwards and the Murrays departed too. Boise Cascade briefly entertained the idea of setting up a hydroelectric power station on the site, but once they failed to get a tax break for the project, they abandoned the idea. In 1988, the dam on the South Fork Siletz was removed and Valsetz Lake drained away. The lakebed soon began to sprout with alder and other successor plants as Boise Cascade stepped back and let the rain do its work, watering their next crop.

Meadows at the townsite.

It might seem on the nose, but don’t think it’s much of a reach to compare the fate of Valsetz with that of the old-growth forest its successive owners ravaged.

A giant Douglas-fir will die eventually, felled by a windstorm or a wildfire, eaten inside out by fungus. But when it dies, it enters the eternal cycle of decay and fertilization that produces a rainforest teeming with life. Bugs and mushrooms and slime molds break it down into rich red dirt, reuse the energy it once stored, digest it until it is nothing but a gentle, moss-covered hump in the forest floor, a nurse log from which new trees are beginning to sprout. Every part of it is recycled. When a log is dragged out of the forest to the mill, that nutrition, that vital energy, is removed. Disturbing the forest can be beneficial – clearings allow for new growth, and many mushrooms thrive best in cut-over areas – but each tree removed does slightly impoverish the ecosystem. To harvest responsibly, that consequence must be kept in mind. Enormous clearcuts and wholesale conversion of the forest into plantations cause so much damage that if we continue in this way it will take centuries or millennia for the land to recover.

Human communities also have their natural lifecycles. Economic shifts, climactic changes, even the vagaries of fashion can spur migration and the abandonment of old homes for new. No town lasts forever; even some of the most ancient cities have been vacated and rebuilt many times over. The idea of a disposable community, however – one built for the rapid extraction of a resource, then discarded once no longer profitable – seems to defy that cycle. Razing a town is just as disruptive to the social world of humanity as a clearcut is to a forest. Both actions come from the same short-term, profit-oriented mindset. I’m not blaming the residents of Valsetz for their loss, of course. They didn’t intend to lose their livelihood; they didn’t write Cobbs & Mitchell a business plan or give their seal of approval to Boise Cascade’s forestry practices. The landowners are the villains here. But as I mentioned in introducing this story, their behavior was not unique. Valsetz is in many ways the prototypical ghost town tale, because it shows how fragile human settlements are without a healthy ecological foundation.

Ivy Van Eps, who had lived in the company town for thirty-three years before its destruction, told the Oregonian: “A town like Valsetz is not supposed to be torn down. It is supposed to be abandoned, be vandalized, decay and die a natural death. Now there won’t be anything left.”

If you drive west from Falls City, past clearcut moonscapes, past the eerie hills of clonal plantation forest, up the Hill and down the other side, you’ll eventually find a flat, open place. This clearing was once the western end of town. The only remaining structure at the site is the raised foundation of the Boise Cascade equipment shop, the last building to be demolished; everything else is smothered in greenery. But in the middle of the shop floor sits a megalithic bonfire ring. It’s the relic of a thirty-year reunion that the people of Valsetz and their descendants held in 2014. Despite being scattered, many of the families who once lived there remain in touch and regularly meet up. Some gauzy remnants of the town’s community still exist.

And if you keep driving west, past what was once the artificial lake, over the winding logging roads that hug the South Fork Siletz, you’ll eventually come to a different kind of remnant. The Valley of the Giants is a tiny parcel of old-growth, fifty-one acres of protected public land surrounded by private industrial forest. Here in the rainiest corner of the country, a patch of the primeval hangs on, preserved as a reminder of what has been lost – and what could be again, if we start thinking on a longer scale, if we embrace decay and natural death.

New growth from old in the Valley of the Giants.

Vanport and Black exclusion

Vanport, Oregon, is by far the largest ghost town I’ll ever cover and, along with Champoeg, the most historically significant. It’s also one of the newest and one of the shortest-lived. Vanport was built in a hurry in 1942, and destroyed overnight six years later by a combination of a hundred-year flood and a hundred years of institutional racism. Just as the story of Champoeg can tell us about settlers’ unfamiliarity with a new environment and the tale of Bridal Veil illustrates the shallow roots of company towns, Vanport shows how the infamous Black exclusion policy of Oregon’s early history has been carried on by more subtle methods to this day.

Fig. 8.1: Usually it’s a little more subtle than building a golf course right on top of the site of one of the state’s most notorious racist incidents.

Vanport, Multnomah County, OR, est. 1942, abandoned 1948

Let’s return to those Black exclusion laws I’ve mentioned in previous posts. The Provisional Government created at Champoeg was as divided on the issue of slavery as was the American government at the time. While nobody believed that Southern-style plantation agriculture would take root in the Northwest’s climate, Jacksonian Democrats claimed that a ban on slavery would be an unconstitutional offense against private property rights, and they knew that if Oregon entered the Union as a free state it would mean additional power for the anti-slavery bloc.

Meanwhile, the Whigs and proto-Republicans among the settlers opposed slavery, but for fairly ugly reasons. Anti-slavery members of the Provisional Government, such as Jesse Applegate, were more worried about the corrosive effects that slavery would have on white people than about the violent degradation the institution inflicted on the enslaved. The idea was that slavery created unfair competition for white workers; it also normalized tyranny and anti-democratic attitudes and was therefore not good for the body politic. (This all might be true, given the history of the South, but is really missing the point.) They also thought that slavery was un-Christian and endangered slaveholders’ souls. Cry me a river.

These two points of view – different, but both essentially racist – soon found an easy compromise. Neither group really wanted Black people in Oregon at all, and in 1844, they had their opportunity.

The Cockstock Incident began with a dispute over a horse between a free Black settler, James D. Saules, and a Wasco man named Cockstock. Saules and Cockstock had worked for another Black farmer, Winslow Anderson, and both claimed that Anderson had promised them the horse as payment. When Cockstock took the horse, Saules reported it stolen, and a warrant was issued for the Native man’s arrest. Cockstock and a few friends went to Oregon City to dispute the charges and were immediately rushed by vigilantes. A street brawl broke out, and within moments three men lay dead. Two white settlers had been slain by the Wasco, one of whom, George LeBreton, was the Clerk and Recorder for the Provisional Government. Cockstock had been killed in turn by Winslow Anderson.

The entire affair was blamed squarely on Saules, who was accused of riling up Indians. His wife was Chinook, and rumors began to circulate that he was planning to incite her people against the Provisional Government in order to get his way. The Reverend Elijah White, the American government’s Indian agent in the territory, wrote to the Secretary of War in Washington:

“[Saules] ought to be transported, together with every other negro, being in our condition dangerous subjects. Until we have some further means of protection their immigration ought to be prohibited. Can this be done?”

Shortly thereafter, the Provisional Government decided it could. Peter H. Burnett, later the first Governor of California, drafted a law that banned slavery – and also banned any Black people from residing in Oregon at all, upon pain of corporal punishment:

“That if such free negro or mulatto shall fail to quit the country, as required by this act, he or she may be arrested upon a warrant issued by some justice of the peace, and, if guilty upon trial before such justice, shall receive upon his or her bare back not less than twenty nor more than thirty-nine stripes, to be inflicted by the constable of the proper county.”

Only two members of the legislature, Hillsboro founder David Hill and Portland founder Asa Lovejoy, voted against the act.

Its passage created an immediate atmosphere of menace for the few Black settlers in Oregon, many of whom fled to what became Washington state – technically under the authority of the Provisional Government but far beyond its effective reach. Jim Saules moved to Cape Disappointment, while the towns of Centralia and Tumwater were both founded by Black Oregonians pushed out by the exclusion law. (Their names, coincidentally, were George Washington and George W. Bush respectively.) Those who did not head north were in danger: Winslow Anderson moved to the Oregon Coast, but was murdered in 1853 and his killer never charged.

Fig. 8.2: The original George W. Bush.

The law was renewed in 1845, switching the penalty from whipping to a period of indentured servitude followed by expulsion. In 1857, Black exclusion was written into the state constitution. Some Oregon legislators requested federal aid in enforcing it, and spun wild fantasies in doing so. Samuel R. Thurston, Oregon’s territorial delegate to Congress, claimed that:

“The negroes associate with the Indians and intermarry, and, if their free ingress is encouraged or allowed, there would a relationship spring up between them and the different tribes, and a mixed race would ensure inimical to the whites; and the Indians being led on by the negro who is better acquainted with the customs, language, and manners of the whites, than the Indian, these savages would become much more formidable than they otherwise would, and long bloody wars would be the fruits of the comingling of the races.

Thurston’s paranoia was coupled with longstanding theories that held the Canadien John McLoughlin to be an agent of the Jesuits; the mixed-race insurrectionary army were to be the foot soldiers of a conspiracy to wipe out white Protestants across North America and deliver the continent to the Pope. Like many conspiracy theories today, it’s so ridiculous it’s funny – you could easily swap out McLoughlin for George Soros – but it also had real, deadly consequences.

Fig. 8.3: Samuel R. Thurston. If it’s any consolation, he shit himself to death at age 34 on a boat back to Oregon from D.C., after contracting a fever.

(If you’re interested in Thurston and his conspiracy theories, he is the primary villain of Moontrap, one of the great historical novels by Don Berry. Berry was Gary Snyder’s less famous roommate at Reed College and is super underrated. I might have to just write a post reviewing his books.)

Despite becoming federally unconstitutional with the passage of the Reconstruction Amendments, the exclusion clause in the Oregon State Constitution remained active until 1926, when it was repealed by referendum. It was used several times to harass Black residents: while only one man, a West Indian hotelier named Jacob Vanderpool, was ever legally expelled, many others were intimidated out of the state on threat of prosecution. This had lasting demographic effects. Before World War II, there were less than 2,000 Black residents in the state. I’m not going to get into the story of the Ku Klux Klan’s presence in Oregon in this post, but their strength in the 1920s probably played a role too; many places across the state became known as “sundown towns” where Black visitors would face deadly violence if they stuck around too long.

That war, however, began to change things.

Across the North and West, the demands of wartime industry accelerated the Great Migration, the ongoing movement of Black people from the rural South seeking better opportunities in cities elsewhere. Oregon’s African-American population went from 2,000 to 20,000 in just a couple years, and much of this growth happened in Vanport.

The planned city on the Columbia Slough was built during the war by industrialist Henry J. Kaiser. In 1941, with war looming and America’s merchant marine unprepared for conflict after twenty years of isolationism, the Roosevelt administration had turned to Kaiser for help. His workers, many of them women encouraged to enter industry for the first time, rose to the challenge. The speed with which the “Liberty ships” were built was legendary: one tank lander built in the Vancouver yard was launched less than three days after the keel was laid.

Fig. 8.4: The Liberty ship SS John McLoughlin being launched at Swan Island.

Kaiser praised his Portland shipwrights in particular:

“It is no exaggeration to say that the performance of this company has astonished the world…

“Perhaps there is no one word to explain the achievement, but more than any other the word ‘loyalty’ stands out in bold relief. Perhaps it was loyalty to your sons and brothers on the battlefronts; perhaps it was loyalty to your country; perhaps it was all of these. It helped you to give a little more than you had; it sustained your will to produce more in less time; to find new ways and methods of speeding every process, to improve your skills and techniques until the whole organization seemed to move as one man…”

There were three Kaiser Shipyards in the Portland metro area: one on Swan Island, one in St. Johns, and one in Vancouver, employing a total of 92,000 people – the vast majority of them new arrivals to the city, imported by Kaiser’s company on chartered trains from the South and East. To house this influx of workers, Kaiser worked with the Housing Authority of Portland (HAP) to create a vast residential complex. In the marshy rectangle now bounded by the Slough, the Columbia River, I-5 and North Portland Ave, they built almost 10,000 apartments, a hospital, a grocery store, schools, nurseries, recreation halls, and a movie theater. While the buildings were cheap, prefabricated jobs, some of the public institutions had an intriguing modernist dash to them, and the design and speedy construction of the city had it hailed by urban planners across the country. With 42,000 residents at its peak, the housing project was called, prosaically, Vanport, because it lay between Portland and Vancouver. It was the second largest city in Oregon.

Fig. 8.5: An aerial view. Vanport was a town of very midcentury workers’ housing.

Many of these new residents were Black: the Great Migration had finally reached Portland. The housing in Vanport was segregated, as were the recreational facilities and the hospital. However, with the rest of Portland made off-limits by redlining, it was one of the few places in the state where African-American families were permitted to live. Its schools were integrated, and Vanport was home to Oregon’s first Black teachers and first Black police officer. Civil rights activists who met in the city would later establish Portland’s Urban League. A hundred years after the Cockstock Incident, the settlement ban had finally been undone.

(I’d encourage anyone who’s read this far to check out the OPB documentary on Vanport, which features interviews with people who grew up in the city and their memories of what life was like in the country’s largest housing project. Most of the illustrative passages I’ve found for this post come from the puffery of propagandists and bigots, and while those quotes are interesting, it’s better to hear everyday history from the mouths of those who really lived it.)

Despite the indispensable work done by the shipwrights, the novel presence of so many African-Americans scared the white Portland establishment. Mayor Earl Riley publicly stated “Portland can absorb only a minimum number of Negroes without upsetting the city's regular life.” Plans were laid to demolish Vanport for industrial development immediately after the war’s end. Not to be too blunt, but this isn’t far from what we’re seeing today in the pandemic, is it? Essential workers – disproportionately poor people and people of color – are praised to the heavens by politicians who then treat them with contempt and do nothing to ensure their safety.

After V-J Day, the shipyards closed, and many of Vanport’s white residents departed to find more permanent and pleasant housing. The Black shipwrights and their families had fewer options. Many probably would have left if they could. Vanport’s hastily built apartments sat on shaky wooden foundations in the marsh, and it was far from the services and amenities of the city center. Unincorporated and located outside the City of Portland, it was administered directly by the HAP, so the residents had no say in its governance. While the state did build the Vanport Extension Center – an educational institute for veterans, which eventually became today’s Portland State University – in the city, its student body was primarily white.

With its raison d’etre now gone, poverty was on the rise in Vanport, and Portland leaders began to openly resent paying for the city. Despite Black residents making up only a third of Vanport’s population, it was dubbed the “Negro project,” and Mayor Riley called it a “municipal monstrosity.” The racist callousness with which they treated the “blighted area” spelled its doom.

Just like Champoeg, Vanport had been built in defiance of environmental safety, and its fragile buildings were extremely vulnerable to the vagaries of the Oregon weather. A 1943 issue of The Bo’s’n’s Whistle, the Kaiser shipyard newsletter, had attempted to assure residents that despite being on the banks of the Columbia, the city was safe from flooding:

“There has been some concern over the fact that Vanport was on a ‘lowland.’ The founding fathers countered with a complete mosquito control program. All underbrush is removed, swamp areas are being filled in, and embankments landscaped, the sloughs are being stocked with fish. The entire project is surrounded by an impervious dike and has a complete drainage system.”

I’m sure you can feel the dramatic irony already. In the spring of 1948, heavy rains began to swell the river. The HAP responded dismissively to concerned residents, telling them in a flyer posted on May 30^th that in the event of a flood “You will be warned if necessary. You will have time to leave. Don't get excited.” Meanwhile, the agency had been stripping its offices and moving its property and records out of the city.

Fig. 8.6: A view along one of the dikes today. They’re still intact... mostly.

Later that very day, the Columbia topped out at fifteen feet above its banks and breached the dirt embankment of the Northern Pacific Railway. In less than an hour, Vanport was completely swallowed. The apartment blocks were lifted right off their wood bases. Fifteen people drowned, and thousands were instantly made homeless. The only reason the death toll wasn’t higher was that the flood had fortuitously hit on Memorial Day, and many of Vanport’s families were out enjoying their vacation.

Fig. 8.7: Underwater.

The city on the slough was a total loss and was never rebuilt. Many refugees were forced to pack into Albina, Portland’s only Black neighborhood, resulting in yet more crowding and poverty. HAP got their wish: the site of Vanport was cleared of ruins and turned over for development. Today, the townsite is home to some light industry, the Portland International Raceway, and the Heron Lakes Golf Club, as well as a small wildlife refuge. The only remaining signs of Vanport are the roads (repaved for golfers and park visitors), the concrete foundation of the movie theater, and the immense earthen dikes that were supposed to protect the city.

Fig. 8.8: Birds and beavers inhabit Vanport today.

Albina itself soon fell victim to the same pattern of malicious neglect from the city government. Deemed a slum and a target for urban renewal, in the 1950s and 1960s large swaths of the neighborhood were bulldozed for I-5, the Rose Quarter stadiums, and the Emanuel Hospital. In the twenty-first century, gentrification continued the job, pushing Albina residents out into deep East Portland as condos rose along N Williams Street. Yet again, the destruction was accelerated by government policy: Oregon implemented a statewide ban on rent control in the 1980s, and Portland City Council has continued to prevaricate on tenants’ rights. Their inaction has directly exacerbated the crisis.

Fig. 8.9: Refugees fleeing Vanport. (Oregon Historical Society)

This all goes to show that Black exclusion was not an episode or an aberration: it has continued since its statutory repeal through officially colorblind policy decisions. Although Oregon’s liberal political leaders today are willing to talk about the tragedy of Vanport and the disgrace that was the 1844 exclusion law, most of them speak of these as past mistakes that must be atoned and apologized for, rather than a continuing process that can be halted through legislative action. Admitting that they have the power to stop gentrification and Black displacement, and to break the cycle that began in the 1840s, would require courage and honesty – traits that so-called leaders like Ted Wheeler have in short supply.

This isn’t a political blog, you might be thinking. Why am I telling the story of Vanport in this way? It’s one of the most important episodes in Oregon’s history and has been covered countless times; I could just have included some links and maybe a blurb about my visit to the townsite. Why’d I recap the whole tale at length?

There’s an essay by Hayden White in which he argues that there are two possible motives for studying history. The good kind of historian is interested in finding out the origins of the contemporary world in order to provide grounding for political projects of liberation. The bad kind is a “cultural necrophile” – his words – who is simply a fan of the past, interested in the stories and aesthetics of bygone times for their own sake.

I think this dichotomy is a bunch of baloney, although I’m definitely going down to the mall at some point to get CULTURAL NECROPHILE put on a custom hat. The reason I study history is because I love the world around me, and because understanding the scintillating complexity and contingency of the world makes me love it all the more. The more I read about the history, culture, biology, and geography of the Northwest the more grateful I feel to live here, in spite of the ugliness of much of what has happened on this land. Love requires honesty, and love of place is no different.

It’s possible to be entertained, thrilled, disgusted, heartbroken, and called to action by history all at once. And how could it be any different? The past is too densely tangled to be reduced to a list of sins committed by oppressors and acts of noble resistance by the oppressed. Lewis and Clark performed an incredible human feat and broadened the world’s scientific knowledge, while acting as agents of imperialist expansion and genocide. The loggers who cleared the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest vandalized a sacred ecosystem for other men’s profits, but at the same time gained deep knowledge of, and respect for, the land on which they worked. Jim Saules stood up for himself and asserted his rights as a Black man before the law – by employing racist tropes of duplicitous Indians to bring death down on Cockstock. The Oregon story is full of evil, but there is no such thing as original sin.

The long and continuous story of Black exclusion in Oregon, from Jim Saules through Vanport to today’s North Portland real estate market, should be told and retold, both to build pressure for revolutionary political change and to celebrate Black Oregonians’ resilience. I notice that when many white people learn about their home’s history, their reaction is to wallow in guilt, declare a Year Zero, and pretend to disown the past. That’s not honest and not productive. If you dismiss your city and state as an inherently, irrevocably flawed cesspit, you foreclose the possibility that it could be anything different. If change is impossible, the only option is eternal self-flagellation. Love your home, embrace the fact that your culture and community shape who you are for both good and ill, and commit to fixing its problems. We’ve got a lot of them, and they can’t wait.

Brian's Ghost Town Safari #4: Bridal Veil and Palmer

Some ghost towns are no more than a name on the map. In the case of Bridal Veil, though, the name’s so unique that it’s kept the place clinging on to existence by a fingernail, long after its industry and residents have departed.

Fig. 7.1: #SaveThePostOffice

Bridal Veil, Multnomah County, OR

Est. 1886, abandoned c. 1990

and

Palmer, Multnomah County, OR
Est. 1886, abandoned c. 1930s

Bridal Veil and its sister town, Palmer, were built in the 1880s by the Bridal Veil Lumbering Company for logging operations on Larch Mountain in the Columbia River Gorge. Bridal Veil was at the bottom of the mountain, on the banks of the Columbia; today its remains lie between I-84 and the Angel’s Rest trailhead. The town’s unusual name came from nearby Bridal Veil Falls, which, as implied, are misty, ethereal, and well worth a visit. “The romantically inclined never fail to name at least one waterfall in a state Bridal Veil,” notes Oregon Geographic Names. (And speaking of romantic names, there have never been true larch on Larch Mountain. The BVLC’s workers cut noble fir.)

Fig. 7.2: The flume from Palmer to Bridal Veil. Got your tube?

Palmer was a little further up the mountainside. Named after the Palmer family that had founded the company, this outpost was where logs were cut at a rough mill before being sent down an enormous wooden flume to the finishing mill, the box factory, and the main railroad tracks. (Some daredevil loggers rode the flume for fun.) Above Palmer, a private rail line operated by the lumber company wound deep into the forest. As one observer wrote:

“Its length is five miles, and it circles and twists in that distance until it resembles the trail of a mammoth serpent. It represents the most difficult achievement of the lumbermen in Oregon. The only feature of the road except the line itself resembles the ordinary narrow-gauge railroad is the 13 ton Baldwin locomotive, the power that pulls the freight. This freight consists of logs which will average of a size equal to that of the engine boiler. These logs are formed from the trees which are felled by the red shirted lumbermen in the employ of the Bridal Veil Lumber Company. After being cut, the logs are rolled to the nearest point on the railroad. They are then arranged in a line, huge staples driven in each end sections of heavy chain attached to the staples forming a train of logs. The foremost of these logs is then chained to the engine, which hauls it and its companions upon the roadbed of the line.”

Together, the twin settlements were the first company towns built in Oregon. They were real, substantial communities, with homes, churches, schoolhouses, and post offices, but apart from a couple preexisting homesteads at the foot of the mountain all the property belonged to the BVLC and the Palmers. Families could fish the Columbia or gather berries for themselves, but all other groceries and dry goods came from the company store – just like in the song. Roughly 180 employees and their families lived in this semi-feudal state.

Fig. 7.3: Bridal Veil mill and town.

Given their historic importance, Bridal Veil and Palmer have been well documented and were a lot more heavily represented in the newspaper archives than some of the other towns I’ve visited. Most of that record consists of epidemics, fires, and industrial accidents. Life in the Gorge was tough.

In 1902, a forest fire tore across Larch Mountain, completely incinerating Palmer. Two boys were killed, and the survivors only endured the blaze by huddling in the mill pond until it had passed. Within a year, however, the town had been rebuilt and was turning out lumber again.

The next tragedy struck down the mountain at the Bridal Veil train station. In 1906, the eastbound Pacific Express steam train suffered a catastrophic malfunction and began speeding uncontrollably down the track. Despite the efforts of its crew, the train came ripping into Bridal Veil and rear-ended the Spokane Flyer, then idling at the station. The Pullman car at the rear of the Flyer was “telescoped,” crushing its passengers. Bridal Veil’s residents rushed to help the victims, but with only one doctor in town and many casualties to aid, five ultimately died. Newspapers of the day recount the gruesomely heroic efforts of the Pacific Express’s locomotive crew to stop the runaway train, without which more lives would have been lost:

“While Fireman Morgan was clinging to a runaway engine and fighting his way through scalding steam to the throttle, Engineer W. H. Swain, with the flesh on his arms and hands cooked, was lying on the bumpers back of the tender striving in vain to cut the air-pipe and set the emergency brakes. Though each effort caused the flesh to peel from his hands, he remained at his post until the crash came and he was thrown off upon the ground.”

Of course, the Oregon Journal reassured readers, these brave men thought nothing of it:

“With his badly burned and lacerated head, hands and arms wrapped in bandages, Fireman Morgan was found at his home, Albina avenue, this morning. Though it was evident he was suffering much pain, the young fireman only laughed when reference was made to his heroic work on the runaway train. To him, taking his life in his own hands is a daily occurrence, and in his own eyes his conduct of yesterday was nothing unusual.”

After the rail accident, two more fires swept through the area in 1917 and 1922, although neither caused as much destruction as the 1902 blaze.

Working in Bridal Veil was dangerous, too. A minor religious celebrity, Thomas Welch, owed his career to an industrial accident on Larch Mountain. While removing broken ties from the elevated railroad trestle at Palmer in 1924, Welch lost his balance and fell fifty-five feet into the mill pond – cracking his head on the support beams on his way down. He was comatose for an hour, and during that time he went to hell.

“The Bible calls it a ‘lake of fire,’ and that is exactly what it was,” he recalled later. “It was a huge lake with little flames about six inches high, and was a blue and blue-green color.”

Welch thought he’d spend the rest of eternity there, but then he felt the presence of Jesus Christ by his side, and he promptly awakened on the floor of the mill office. (His coworkers, who’d thought he was dead when they hauled him from the pond, got a real shock.) He spent his life recounting the story of his trip to hell at church meetings and tent revivals, and he became a fixture on Pat Robertson’s The 700 Club in the 1970s.

Fig. 7.4: Scorched trees surround the railroad trestle and mill pond at Palmer, the site of Thomas Welch’s brush with the Eternal. If you look closely, you can see the train hauling a line of logs.

Like most logging operations of the era, the Bridal Veil Lumbering Company clear-cut recklessly over the years, and Larch Mountain’s old-growth forests were growing depleted by the 1930s. The Depression didn’t help the company’s finances, and labor unrest was starting to shake the old patriarchal company-town system. (The BVLC’s employees were “organized” as a local of the Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen, a powerless dummy union set up by the military during World War I; when some Bridal Veil millworkers began organizing a real, independent union in 1935, they were run out by sheriff’s deputies.) In 1936, yet another fire damaged the planing mill, and the company decided to call it quits.

The entire town was sold to – seriously – a subsidiary of Kraft Cheese. There were no macaroni dinners or Kraft Singles in the 1930s, and Kraft cheese came in wooden boxes; a company town with a preexisting box factory seemed like an ideal investment for the growing dairy company. The last remnants of Palmer, which had been in decline as logging technology evolved, were fully abandoned at this point and Bridal Veil transitioned from a lumber town to a manufacturing town. As well as cheese boxes, the company did a roaring trade in ammunition boxes during World War II, and then in doors and window sashes during the postwar housing boom. They made fruit crates, wooden toys, and mousetraps. Ironically, this sort of diversification into secondary wood products was bigged up as a solution to unemployment in rural Oregon after the lumber industry’s collapse in the 1980s, but it doesn’t seem to have been a long-term solution for Bridal Veil.

In the early sixties, the mill closed and the rapidly dying town was purchased by – seriously, again – a NASCAR driver named Hershel McGriff. He kept some people on to operate a small lumber yard, but Bridal Veil was never the same. McGriff began slowly demolishing the town’s historic buildings, initially with a view to redeveloping, but it appears he gave up on the project at some point. In 1990 he sold everything to the Trust for Public Land. The plan was to rewild the site, converting Bridal Veil into parkland that could be added to the Gorge’s recreation areas.

Fig. 7.5: The imperfectly rewilded lumberyard today.

This process has, however, been almost ridiculously slow. All the commercial buildings were torn down, despite pleas from historic preservationists, but no park development has taken place, and thirty years on the area between the mountainside and I-84 is still full of overgrown foundations and roadways. A few private homes still cling on, however, and there are some unique remains that keep Bridal Veil from being entirely forgotten.

(Hershel McGriff, by the way, is now in his 90s and still racing – he’s been recognized as the world’s oldest stock car driver.)

I drove down via the Historic Columbia River Highway (worth an excursion all its own) on a gray, drizzly weekend in January. I’d been to the site before to use the trailhead, but hadn’t had any idea there was a ghost town in the underbrush. It took a few minutes poking around to start spotting remnants.

Fig. 7.6: Two of many distressingly youthful graves.

The first is the cemetery, which I almost missed at first since it looks like it’s in a private backyard. It was a morose place. Bridal Veil is blessed with a view of the Gorge, but today the whole place hums with highway traffic from the interstate, and while the cemetery was mowed it also looked very seldom visited. It became even more morose when I noticed that most of the graves belonged to children, casualties of the diptheria epidemics of the late nineteenth century.

The little post office pictured at the top of the article is the other main survivor. Apparently, people like to have their wedding invitations postmarked “Bridal Veil” - and this is big enough business that the USPS continues to operate the Bridal Veil post office today! It was closed when I visited, but I could see through the door that it really is just a regular post office inside - PO boxes, linoleum floors, dreary federal posters and all. I noted, however, that all the electric meters and other equipment on the outside of the building were labeled as property of the City of Cascade Locks, several miles away. Bridal Veil may still exist as far as the Postal Service is concerned, but that’s about its only official status.

Fig. 7.7: The remains of Bridal Veil station today, with a petrochemical bomb train rushing by. Not to soapbox or anything, but when one of those inevitably derails in the Gorge it’s going to make that 1906 collision look like a picnic.

Beyond the post office lies a wide field of crumbly asphalt and concrete where the industrial buildings used to be. They are being overtaken by invasive blackberry bushes and some of the roads have already been covered in thick pads of moss. Heaps of more modern garbage have been left by illegal dumpers. A freight train hurtled by, carrying carloads of lumber: wood is still big business in the Northwest, but it doesn’t support as many people, or as many towns, as it used to.

I decided to look for the site of Palmer up the slope, and that’s when the real adventure started. The town had been abandoned by the 1930s, and the remnants were demolished by the Forest Service in 1944, but I had read online that its footprint is still visible if you’re paying attention. I drove up Palmer Mill Road to investigate.

Soon I began passing signs saying things like UNIMPROVED ROAD EXERCISE EXTREME CAUTION and ROUTE CLOSED IN WINTER, and the track degraded into a strip of muddy rock on the edge of a cliff. Unfortunately, by this point there was no way to turn around and I knew I just had to keep going until the road spat me out near Corbett on the mountaintop. There was no sign of the ghost town, and I quickly focused more on saving my ass as I crawled up the slope. I kept sliding backwards into my seat like I was on a roller coaster. For reference, I drive a 2008 Hyundai Elantra; while it has taken some pretty severe backroads beatings and survived, this was definitely pushing it.

Spoiler alert: I survived to get home and do some research. Apparently, a century ago, Palmer Mill Road so notoriously difficult to navigate that it was literally used by motorists to test their cars’ endurance. In 1913, a Portland auto dealer trying to demonstrate the capabilities of Federal-brand trucks brought a group of reporters on an excursion up the 30% inclines to Palmer. The headlines were glowing:

Fig. 7.8: Blatant sponsored content is nothing new.

“Any automobile that climbs the grade from the highway up this road to the town of Palmer,” asserted the Oregonian, “can qualify in the mountain goat class.” It’s official: I’m going to start calling my car the Mountain Goat from now on.

Of course, I knew none of this at the time, and spent the drive alternately cursing my bad judgment and drinking in the vistas of mist blowing through the ferns. A few miles up the goat track, I passed a homestead. There in the midst of the forest was an enormous, unpainted, lichen-coated barn and farmhouse, walled off with wire and guarded by a German shepherd who barked furiously as I passed. I noted the inhabitants’ trucks: living on a road like this, their lift kits clearly weren’t just for show.

The road eventually leveled off and pavement began to reappear. As I wound back through Corbett, I made two resolutions: to trade in the Mountain Goat for something with a higher center and four-wheel drive, and to always double-check the road conditions before my ghost town expeditions.

Brian's Ghost Town Safari #3: Tonquin

This is when I realized my hobby was getting serious.

In February, I made plans to go to the gun range with a friend. I hadn’t been shooting in a while, she’d never done it, and we’d found a discount on an introductory handgun class. It was to be held at the Tri-County Gun Club outside Sherwood, a good ways drive from our respective houses, and so as the date of the class neared I looked up the route on Google Maps to see how long it would take us to get there. Then I spotted an unfamiliar placename on the map.

Fig. 6.1: I used to work at a trucking company where Google Maps was the only website we had access to. I spent a lot of my down time exploring places like this virtually.

The greyed-out, widely kerned placenames usually correspond to places that are unincorporated and don’t have their own zip codes. Some ghost towns appear on Maps that way, and this one looked like it could be one of that species of towns that has kind of lost its independent identity and merged into the surrounding exurbia. I looked up Tonquin, Oregon, and that’s exactly what had happened. Once I saw that there was a picturesquely shabby historic building there, too, I knew we were going to have to make a detour.

Tonquin, Washington County, OR

Est. 1908

After receiving some quality firearms education (I’ll put in a plug for 540 Tactical here, I promise it’s not paid sponsorship) we drove back along SW Tonquin Road and turned left at the WES tracks. Here, sandwiched by a quarrying operation to the west and Tualatin’s new-build tract homes to the northeast, was Tonquin.

Fig. 6.2: All aboard.

Just west of the tracks, the center and raison d’être of the vanished place looms large. The Tonquin Electric Transformer Substation (as the state historic preservation office calls it) was built circa 1913 in a Spanish Revival style that might be familiar to residents of Northeast Portland. The building provided power for nearby sections of the Oregon Electric Railway, an interurban train service; it also appears to have served as a post office for the small community that sprung up around the stop.

Fig. 6.3: Check out those OG wooden louvers.

The MAX and WES systems were not the first commuter train services in the Portland metro area. You may have seen old tracks poking through the asphalt in various spots around town, but not only was the city crisscrossed with streetcars in the early 20^th century, there was a whole passenger rail network spread across Western Oregon. The PEPCO line, whose main right of way is now the Springwater Corridor, spread deep into rural Clackamas County. The OER connected downtown Portland to Salem, Corvallis, and Eugene. Now, I’m not a gearhead and I’m not going to go into the details of rail gauges or different kinds of rolling stock or anything. I’m mostly interested in the social effects the trains must have had. What would it mean to be able to commute from Salem to Portland at the turn of the twentieth century? What would it be like for a rural community like, say, Monitor to be accessible by rail from the city? I’m only just beginning to learn about the topic and looking at the PEPCO and OER maps lately has been blowing my mind, not least for all the ghostly station names. (And check out this recently-made Underground-style map of all the metro area’s interurban lines.)

Before the OER was built the Tonquin area was a nameless stretch of farmland. According to my edition of Oregon Geographic Names, its very identity as a locale came straight from the railroad and its promoters: “When the Oregon Electric Railway was built in 1907-08, it was the policy of the company to establish stations with names of historic interest to Oregonians and the station Tonquin was named for the ship that brought the Astor party to Astoria.”

Not to digress too far, but the story of the Tonquin is worth retelling. New York-based fur mogul John Jacob Astor sent the ship west in 1811 to set up a trading post at the mouth of the Columbia and gather pelts for sale in China. After establishing Astoria as the first white settlement in the Pacific Northwest, they sailed north to begin trading for pelts on Vancouver Island. They never returned. Eventually, the ship’s only survivor, a native Quinault man named Joseachal who had been working for the Astorians as an interpreter, returned to the mouth of the Columbia to tell the tale.

Fig. 6.4: The Tonquin being boarded, complete with contemporary fake news chyron

The Tonquin had been commanded by one Joseph Thorn, a 32-year-old Barbary War hero whose arrogant and capricious leadership had already cost him the crew’s loyalty. Apparently, during trade negotiations with the Tla-o-qui-aht nation on Vancouver Island, Thorn had lost his temper again – fatally, this time. He smacked his interlocutor across the face with a fur. Fighting broke out and the outnumbered Astorians were quickly slaughtered. Joseachal was taken as a slave. However, one wounded man was left alive on the ship as the Tla-o-qui-aht retreated for the night. When they returned to loot the Tonquin’s stores the following day, the survivor torched the powder magazine and blew up the ship in a spectacular act of revenge. It’s a grim story – pretty far from the pleasant monikers like Springfield or Hillsdale that we usually give our planned towns – but it is interesting, I’ll give the OER that.

If we’re talking names, though, we can go further back. Astor’s ship’s name was a variant spelling of Tonkin, which was then the Romanized term for northern Vietnam: Đông Kinh. There are a million towns in the United States named after locations overseas, from Paris, Texas, to Canton, Ohio, but I’m not aware of any other placenames of Vietnamese origin. Tonquin might be unique.

Naturally, the announcement of a station serving this sleepy section of the valley led to a flurry of property speculation. An incomplete grid of numbered streets still exists around the substation today, indicating that the area was platted separately from the surrounding burghs; newspapers of the 1900s and 1910s are full of breathless advertisements and land deals. One early investor in Tonquin was A. L. Barbur, the Portland city auditor for whom the clogged artery in Southwest is named.

Fig. 6.5: Call Billy Grippo now.

The area was probably never much busier than it is today. As far as I can tell from The Oregonian’s archives, only two newsworthy events ever happened in Tonquin after the station opened. First, in 1916, a murder victim was found in a ditch nearby. Then, in 1918, there was an accident involving a pair of railroad hand carts. Two teams of workers were returning the carts to the substation at the end of the day, pumping along the tracks, when one of the men on the lead cart lost his hat and stopped the cart to pick it up. The other cart’s operators didn’t notice and kept on seesawing along until they collided. Fortunately, since they were right on the rail line, all four men could be rushed to the hospital in Portland by train. Most other mentions of Tonquin in the newspapers relate either to property sales or misdemeanor arrests.

Like many other big booms in the American West, the era of interurban rail was short-lived. Ridership on the OER peaked in 1920. As the personal automobile began its inexorable rise to domination of our built environment, rail commuter numbers tumbled across the country. (Meanwhile, the intra-urban streetcar lines that fed into them were allegedly bought up and steered into deliberate collapse by a cabal of auto manufacturers. The “streetcar conspiracy” is a very big and controversial story so I won’t get into it here. You might recognize it as the plot of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which is probably still the best movie ever made about American transportation. I’ve always thought that if they ever make a sequel, it should be about Roger and Jessica teaming up with Jane Jacobs to stop the Lower Manhattan Expressway.)

The OER began closing branch lines in 1931 and ceased passenger service altogether in 1933, only 25 years after it opened. The Tonquin substation was abandoned and the post office closed. Overnight, Tonquin lost any pretensions of being a town. The railroad still ran through it – the OER line was operated by Burlington Northern for freight through the rest of the 20^th century, and this section is now used by the WES – but trains no longer stopped. The federal government still has the name on the books as a “populated place,” but it’s not census-designated and does not have its own zip code.

Tonquin was never a major hub of activity, just a quiet spot on the fringe of the metro area with an exurban mix of residential and industrial buildings. This is what makes it an interesting variety of ghost town. It’s not that it was destroyed or abandoned, it’s just no longer as much of a distinct locale. The railroad station was the seed out of which the place grew, and it’s been disused for over a century. Sherwood and Tualatin have grown around it and blurred its borders.

If I was a real journalist or historian, and if I’d known I was going to write this, I would have stopped there a little bit longer. I’d have gone up to one of the houses across from the substation, knocked on the door, and asked if Tonquin exists as a community for its residents. Do people lend each other tools, give each other lifts, invite one another over for dinner? Are people proud to live in Tonquin? Maybe it’s not a ghost town at all, not for them. (If you know anyone who lives there, please direct them to this article!) But to the rest of the world, Tonquin, Oregon is just a label – and one absent from most maps.

Like I said, I’m not much of a rail guy, but I am kind of interested in doing some more exploration and seeing how the interurbans affected settlement, community-building, and placemaking. At some point I’m going to check out the Oregon Electric Railway museum outside Salem, and there’s supposed to be another one of these Spanish Revival substations in the similarly-faded locale of Waconda nearby. I’ve also been told there are a lot of railroad artifacts left behind on the eastern end of the PEPCO line. Like most things I’ve looked at so far on the blog, the interurbans can be a real rabbit hole.