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.