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
Est. 1886, abandoned c. 1990
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.)
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:
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
“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.
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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.
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.
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 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.
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.
