The industrial revolution of the late nineteenth century brought with it an increased national appetite for many natural resources and the vast forests of the Pacific Northwest provided a significant location of valuable, largely untapped, resources. This environment attracted many people with dreams of wealth and while a few of the dreamers succeeded, most did not.
The railroads of the period began to drive toward Gray's harbor and its riches.There were numerous attempts to tap the rich timber resources of Grays Harbor with rail service. The summer of 1889 saw the O&WT making plans to reach Grays Harbor, but due to questionable legal actions brought by the NP, the road was never completed and the O&WT fell into receivership.
In 1887, the Puget Sound & Grays Harbor (PS&GH) railroad was organized by the owners of the Port Blakely Mill company. This line was projected to run from Kamilche on the southern tip of Puget Sound to Grays Harbor passing through Elma and Montesano. By 1889 the PS&GH stretched from Kamilche to Montesano, thus placing the railroad within ten miles of Grays Harbor.
The Northern Pacific Railroad was the first line to serve the Grays Harbor region of Washington state. The first portions of the Grays Harbor Branch were completed in 1892 when the line terminated in Ocosta-by-the-sea. However, shortly after the line was completed the devastating financial panic of 1893 coupled with a lack of expected federal funds to deepen the harbor near Ocosta and a large labor strike spelled trouble for the Ocosta terminus. Nearly four years later, on October 21, 1898, the NP managed to extend the line over the Wishkah river, through central Aberdeen and on to Hoquiam.
When Hoquiam was reached the many mills and industries along the waterfront in Aberdeen and Hoquiam were accessible to the NP. The success of this line can be viewed in the traffic data for 1900 shown below.
Station
| Tons forwarded26,872
2,176
27,446
8,357
| Tons received2,590
917
18,261
37,820
| Passengers2,492
1,452
11,450
18,312 |
It took almost 20 years for the Northern Pacific's competition to arrive on Gray's Harbor. the UP finally arrived on Grays Harbor. The Oregon and Washington Railroad, a subsidiary of the UP, shared a line with the Milwaukee Road to Grays Harbor along south side of the Chehalis River valley, roughly paralleling the NP line on the north side of the valley. The UP, however, learned from the NP blunder in Ocosta and ran their line directly to Aberdeen. Joint facilities were constructed in both Aberdeen and Hoquiam with a small engine-servicing facility in Hoquiam.
By 1911 there were 15 mills in the towns on Gray's Harbor. The mills could cut 600,000 board feet of timber a day, cut 300,000 shingles a day, cut 125,000 feet of lath a day. Gray's Harbor included sash and door factories, furniture factories, box factories, a veneer plant, a pulp mill, and factory devoted to producing piano sounding boards. The combined population of the two largest towns, Aberdeen and Hoquiam, stood at about 25,000 people.
For 40 some years following the arrival of the rails, Gray's Harbor County built itself up as one of the pre-eminent lumber capitals of Washington, a state not known for small mills.
The local boosters brochures of the day boast of cutting competition of the day. One mill cut 541,000 feet in a single day – another 460,000 in 20 hours. The Hoquiam Lumber and Shingle Company had a daily capacity of 760,000 shingles. Polson Brothers, the biggest timber company in the world, had cut 132 million board feet in 1908. The timber they cut seemed turned to gold, gold in the form of cash money, money for the railroads, money for the mill owners, money for the mill hands. By 1910, it had created a county of timber workers receiving an annual payroll of ten million dollars, working for 50 mills that could turn a forest into three million board feet of lumber every ten hours. It was just the beginning.
It should be noted that Gray's Harbor was strained going both directions. On the way up the towns roiled through turbulent strikes, often led by the wild men of the woods, the International Workers of the World, or “Wobblies” as they were colloquially known. In March of 1912 the Wobblies set off a strike in Aberdeen and Raymond, just to the south on Willapa Harbor, after mill owners rejected a demand for higher wages. It settled, as most things seemed to, against the Wobblies. A citizen's committee “proposed that the with strike be settled on the basis of a minimum wage of $2.25 a day, preference for American labor and exclusion of all IWW members. This was accepted by the operators, and, because crews were secured, the strike was lost in spite of the fact that the IWW attempted to have it spread to all lumber workers in western Washington.”
With or without agitation, Gray's Harbor County was headed towards the high point of its timber career in the decade ahead. In 1922, Aberdeen was home to some 12 logging, mill, and timber companies. Abbey's Logger's Blue Book records the count: Aberdeen Lumber and Shingle –165,000 feet a day; American Mill – 140,000; Anderson-Middleton –165,000; Bay City Lumber – 160,000; E. K. Bishop – 150,000; Hulbert Mill – 130,000; Saginaw Timber – 75,000; Western Mill Company of Aberdeen – 140,000; Wilson Brothers – 140,000; Donovan Lumber – 300,000. Hoquiam followed close behind with nine mills: Eureka Cedar – 150,000; Northwest Lumber – 125,000; E. K. Wood – 150,000; Hoquiam Lumber and Shingle – 200,000; National Lumber and Manufacturing – 250,000; Gray's Harbor Lumber – 350,000. In Hoquiam, the consolidation into a smaller number of huge mills had begun
By 1925 the 112 mills of Gray's Harbor County employed 11,000 people with an annual payroll of $17 million, maintained 340 miles of logging railroad, and could cut 4.8 million board feet in eight hours. That year, the mills would cut about 1.3 billion board feet, and were already aiming for 1.6 billion the next. That decade, the mills of the county cut about 20 percent of Washington State's total – year in, year out.
The bubble burst with the onset of the Great Depression. In 1929 the county produced nearly as many board feet as the heady year of 1925. In 1930 however, this number dropped precipitously – to about 790 million board feet. In 1931 it fell again, this time to about 420 million board feet. In 1932 it dropped for the third straight year, to about 220 million board feet. What had been a torrent of timber had slowed to a trickle, and a generation would pass without the county being able to produce more than ten percent of the state's total of board feet. Gray's Harbor County had fallen into a coma from which it has never fully recovered.
The terrible fall was made worse by strife and strikes. In 1934 a longshoreman's strike shut down west coast waterfronts for some 84 days. Gray's Harbor, frequented by some 650 vessels in 1923, became a stranger to shipping.
Foreign steamship operators were forced to route their vessels and cargoes via British Columbia ports during the long tie-up of American ports and some of them, having transferred their major Northwest functions north of the border, retained them there. Indicative of the tremendous advantage enjoyed by Canada during the strike is the lumber shipment barometer.
A total of only 2,748,920,847 feet was shipped from all Northwest ports. Washington exports totaled only 1,294,942,925 feet, a figure which Gray's Harbor alone had approached during the boom years, and a decline of over a quarter of a billion feet over the depression figures of 1933.
Oregon shipments dropped to 594,513,208 feet, but British Columbia, a negligible factor in pre-Depression figures, showed almost a 30 percent gain in 1934 over 1933, reaching a total of 859,464,714 feet, approaching the Washington figure and far exceeding that of Oregon.
The following year the mill workers went out. May 6, 1935, saw some 10,000 men on strike. One attempt to open the mills of Aberdeen was stopped by an enormous picket line of nearly 2,000. In a little over a month the governor had sent in the National Guard, who were stationed around the mills to ensure those who wished to work could do so. Almost a month passed before a vote was held in Tacoma on August 5. The vote went 1,391 to 97 to accept a settlement, but the mill workers in Gray's Harbor stayed out. Only on August 20 did Gray's Harbor County strikers bend to the mediation efforts of a brigadier from the Washington National Guard.
Even after the effects of the Great Depression wore off, the timber economy remained stagnant. Between 1940 and 1950 there was less than two tenths of one percent population growth in the county, and employment in the timber industry had barely risen above the level at the beginning of the decade, despite the boom times of World War Two. State social workers looking into the morose conditions stated flatly “The principal factor is that no entirely new industries have found there way into the industrial make up of the county.” In 1948, 93 percent of the total manufacturing payroll in the county came from logging and lumber, 75 percent of the people in the county were likely relying upon, directly or indirectly, the timber industry for their livelihood. Gray's Harbor was living, and dying, by the axe.
Montesano
Montesano is eight miles east of Aberdeen on the Chehalis River near the mouth of Wynooche River in central Grays Harbor County, between Schafer and Aberdeen Junction. The first settler was Isaiah L Scammon, who came from Maine by sea by way of California, arriving in 1852. When the county of Chehalis (which was later changed to Grays Harbor) was created on April 14, 1854 the Washington Territorial Legislature located the county seat "at the house of D K Welden. (Laws of Washington, 1854) In 1883, the town of Montesano was surveyed and platted, the plat being filed on July 27, 1883. The population and the business went to the prairie town and in 1886 the county seat was moved and Scammon’s place became South Montesano.
Montesano was an active hub for the timber industry. Over the years the town served the likes of: the American Mill Company, the J C Biles logging operation, the Chehalis County Logging and Timber Company, the C H Clemons Logging Company, the Clemons Logging Company, the Coal Creek Logging and Timber Company, the Sol Foss and Daniel Gillies logging operations, The Gray’s Harbor Commercial Company, the M Huston operations, the E H Lester Logging Company, the Saginaw Timber Company, the Schafer Brothers Logging Company, the Schafer Lumber and Door Company, the Simpson Logging Company, the Stimson Mill Company, the Sylvia Shingle Company and the Ulmidmor Company.
By 1955, massive company closures and/or mergers reduced the timber company presence in Montesano. Only the headquarters for the Schafer Brothers Logging Company remained active.
The same thing happened with the railroads.The Melbourne and North River Railroad Company, the Montesano and
Northern Railroad Company, and the Puget Sound and Gray’s Harbor Railroad
and Transportation Company all merged with the Northern Pacific or Union Pacific Railroads.The Schafer Bothers Logging Company was the only logging railroad still active, the Saginaw Timber Company having stopped rail operations 10 years earlier.
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