The small town of Pe Ell is located in the Chehalis River Valley of western Lewis County not far from the border with Pacific County. Non-Native settlement in the area that became Pe Ell began in the 1850s. Many settlers during the late 1800s were immigrants from Poland and other European countries, whose descendants in town maintained their heritage. The 1892 completion of the Northern Pacific Railway's Chehalis-to-South Bend branch line through Pe Ell, where a depot was built, promoted the town's growth. Pe Ell was incorporated on March 9, 1906.
Early Settlers
The first non-Native settler in the Pe Ell area is considered to have been Pierre Charles (1794-?), a French Canadian trapper and former employee of the Hudson's Bay Company. Brothers Perry O. (1830-1875) and Andrew J. (1834-1874) Roundtree also reached Pe Ell in 1854. Soon thereafter Perry Roundtree served as a 2nd Lieutenant during the 1855-1856 armed conflict pitting U.S. troops and settlers against some Indian forces angered by treaties forced on them that required they give up most of their homelands and move to small reservations. Peter P. Ells is believed to be another of the first homesteaders in the Pe Ell area, but little is known about him. Also unknown is the origin of the name "Pe Ell." Various accounts have circulated over the years, but none have been documented.
Beginning in the 1850s many families settled in the Pe Ell region. A substantial number of the new settlers were immigrants from Poland, Germany, Austria, Lithuania, Switzerland, and other countries.
Joseph (1823-1910) and Karolina (Caroline) (1825-1919) Mauermann and their family arrived in September 1855 by wagon as the first permanent residents to settle at Pe Ell. The area they homesteaded came to be known as Mauermann's Prairie. Nine years after arriving the family, which included children Joseph, Dell, Loudt, Omer (1857-1900), Senny, Amelia, and Robert, entertained their first guest.
In 1879, Simeon C. Wheeler (1837-1917) moved to Pe Ell with his sister Austa Ann Wheeler Hendricks (1840-1931) and her husband John T. Hendricks (1846-?), who took a homestead claim. Austa Hendricks became the first Pe Ell postmaster on July 21, 1886, opening the first post office in their home.
The first Pe Ell School opened in 1882 but a school building was not built until 1884, with 12 students then in attendance. The first teacher was Inez Isabel Townsend (1867-1927) of Centralia, some 20 miles northeast of Pe Ell. The Pe Ell School later moved to the Kroll Farm.
Marzell Muller (1859-1917), a Swiss immigrant, married Eleanor Liebert (1863-1915) on October 20, 1885. They moved west from Illinois to start a new life in the Pe Ell region. Marzell's brothers Joseph Maria (1827-?) and Frank (1858-1917) Muller arrived from Switzerland in the fall of 1888 to join him, assisting in building a sawmill powered by a homemade wheel on his homestead near Pe Ell. Joe and Frank filed for their homesteads in 1889. Joe and Marzell planted corn, grain, and cotton. Marzell's dream had been to homestead. His land was near a waterfall. He built a one-room log cabin on the land.
Polish-born John Kotula (1854-1943) arrived in Pe Ell in 1889, settling at the east end of the region. He built a home with six rooms and three porches on the ground floor, a large barn, and many outbuildings.
The Railway Arrives
Washington became a state on November 11, 1889. Eighteen months later, on May 27, 1891, Omer (also known as Otto) Mauermann, son of early settlers Joseph and Karolina Mauermann, and his wife Tillie Willard Mauermann (1866-1901), platted the town of Pe Ell on their homestead. John L. Gruber was appointed postmaster on June 23, 1891, serving through June 30, 1893.
In February 1892, a two-story, 28-by-50-foot schoolhouse was built. At the time the Northern Pacific Railway was building a branch line from Chehalis to South Bend, and the tracks passed through Pe Ell. The company built a depot in Pe Ell, a two-story wooden structure. Mail delivery by rail began as soon as the line began serving the depot. Mail was carried in pouches or a pushcart. Within a few years of the railroad's arrival, more settlers moved into the town of Pe Ell and other nearby communities.
Polish and Swiss immigrants established the Roman Catholic parish of St. Joseph. Michael Fafara (1862-1914) served the parish from 1892 to 1903. Like towns across the state, Pe Ell experienced economic decline during the Panic of 1893, with fewer new settlers moving to Lewis County. But the hard times did not last.
Logging Town
Wallace Charles Yeoman (1859-1932) and his son Charles Lee Yeoman (1887-?) built their Yeomans Lumber Company mill near the site of the Northern Pacific depot in 1893. As the economy rebounded, in 1897 Harry McCormick (d. 1911) and F. B. Hubbard (1861-?) organized the McCormick Lumber Company. Located two miles west of Pe Ell on the Northern Pacific's South Bend branch line, the company consisted of a shingle mill, a planing mill, dry kilns, cross-arm factory, machine shop, offices, bunkhouse, and a company store. The primary business was to produce cross-arms to carry telephone and telegraph lines for the Chicago-based Western Union Telegraph Company.
Marion E. Harlan (1860-1928), and Lee and Homer Wood built homes on their homesteads in 1898. Pe Ell's town cemetery, known as Forest Lawn Cemetery, was established on December 10, 1898. In 1899, Dr. Garnet moved from Seattle to Pe Ell to practice medicine. Harry W. McCormick became postmaster on May 31, 1899.
By the turn of the century, Pe Ell had become a thriving logging town, with three sawmills, three shake mills, and a broom-handle factory. The town also boasted a three-story hotel, three stores, two livery stables, blacksmiths, two real-estate offices, and a saloon.
Hubbard sold his share of the McCormick Lumber Company in 1902 and opened the Eastern Railway and Lumber Company in Centralia. That same year Joseph and Frank Muller sold the pioneer sawmill they had helped build in the 1880s on Rock Creek in Pe Ell to the McCormick Lumber Company. Marzell Muller was the builder of the large McCormick mill, with four machines powered by steam. He constructed a huge sundial on one end of the mill that could be seen a quarter of a mile away.
As early as 1903, residents of Pe Ell petitioned the Board of County Commissioners to incorporate the town. A successful petition was presented to the commissioners in February 1906, and on March 1, residents voted overwhelmingly in favor of incorporating. In addition to approving the incorporation, voters elected August Frank Meyer (1868-1962) as the new town's first mayor, Frank McKnight as town clerk, and J. G. Dunlap as treasurer. Lewis Ratkowski, Wallace Charles Yeomans, J. Donahoe, B. G. Austin, and J. P. Duckett were elected to the town council. The incorporation took effect on March 9, 1906, when the incorporation paperwork was filed with the Washington Secretary of State's office.
A Growing Community
As the town grew, businesses arrived to entertain residents and workers at the mills and other enterprises. Bowling alleys, carousels, dance halls, movie theaters, three pool halls, and numerous saloons were built.
In the early years of the twentieth century Pe Ell residents had a variety of local news sources. Benjamin Thompson published the weekly Pe Ell Guardian from 1901 to 1906. Perry M. Watson managed the weekly Enterprise from 1901 through 1913. During the first decade of the century, a steady flow of Republican, Democratic, Socialist, union, ethnic, and other area newspapers were also issued. Most of them lasted only for short periods of time.
The Olympic Club Hotel was built in 1908. Also that year partners Gabriel Assef (1883-1967) and Gabriel Anthony Bitar (1872-1947) opened a dry-goods store named the Fair Store. The partnership dissolved in 1909.
By 1909, Pe Ell had a bank, three dry-goods stores, two general stores, three grocery stores, two barber shops, five saloons, four hotels, a blacksmith, three school buildings (serving 248 students), four churches, and a three-story opera house. There were many dairy farms in the area around the town, and its three large sawmills and three shingle mills employed much of the population, producing product every day.
In November 1909, Pe Ell voters decided to go dry and ban the sale of alcohol in town. In what was seen as a perhaps-surprising decision for a tough little logging town, the proposal to eliminate the town's five saloons prevailed with 78 votes in favor and 58 opposed. The local Prohibition measure predated statewide Prohibition by five years and national Prohibition by a decade.
Automobiles were becoming more reliable and appearing all over the state. As roads improved the increasing use of automobiles allowed mail to be delivered directly to farms, ending the need for little post offices managed in parlors or small spaces in stores. The old system of trails and water transportation, and eventually even railroad service, would become secondary to automobiles.
In 1911, there was discussion of changing the spelling of the town name from "Pe Ell" to "P-L," but the spelling never changed. In November 1912, a new Pe Ell High School was built. In August 1914, the Pe Ell Hotel was destroyed by an early-morning fire of unknown origin.
The town had multiple churches serving the spiritual needs of residents, including the Pe Ell Methodist Church. Some of them, such as the Holy Cross Polish National Catholic Church, helped many congregation members retain the customs and traditions of the European countries from which they or they families had emigrated.
The McCormick Lumber Company, which employed an estimated 300 workers, remained an economic mainstay of the town. It survived three devastating major fires, the last in 1909 when the entire mill plant was destroyed, but the company owned considerable timber lands and rebuilt and reopened the mill each time. Even after the stock market collapse of October 29, 1929, triggered the Great Depression, the company continued to prosper at first, but it was sold and the mill dismantled in 1931. During the 1930s, the mill building was used as a sanitarium. As they did across the country, jobs disappeared and economic growth was at a standstill. Mills and other businesses shut down and many residents moved away.
Pe Ell Moves Forward
Economic growth resumed nationwide at the end of the decade, when World War II triggered rapid increases in spending and employment. Pe Ell remained a small town, but it did expand its geographic area several times, as voters approved annexations of outlying areas in 1952 and in 1953.
In 1990, Burlington Northern, which then operated the railroad line between Chehalis and South Bend that passed through Pe Ell, which had been built a century earlier by the Northern Pacific Railway, discontinued the branch line. In 1993, the Washington State Parks and Recreation Commission purchased the right-of-way to convert the former rail line to a recreational trail, the Willapa Hills State Park Trail. The final link between Chehalis and Pe Ell, a distance of 22 miles, was completed in June 2016. The entire trail from Chehalis to South Bend is 56 miles and largely flat. Most of the trail runs parallel to, sometimes immediately adjacent to, State Route 6, the area's primary highway corridor. Pe Ell is a trailhead on the Willapa Hills Trail. As a trailhead, it is a destination for those who enjoy horseback riding, cycling, and day hikes. The trailhead is located near the center of town.
In July 2006, Pe Ell celebrated 100 years with a four-day commemoration of the town. The following year in 2007, Polish Daze was born, a nod to the town's Polish heritage. The event included displays, food vendors, kids' games, and madcap contests. The quilt show became one of the more popular attractions. Pe Ell also annually celebrates the 4th of July with a parade and hosts a fireworks display.
On May 16, 2015, the first Pe Ell Farmers Market opened at the corner of SR 6 and West 7th Street. The market started off with three vendors and has expanded over the years. Weekly the vendors sell everything from arts and crafts to plants, fruit and garden vegetables, and more. Most of the fruits and garden vegetables are from local residents. The market is open on Saturdays from mid-May to the first weekend in October.
In the twenty-first century Pe Ell maintains its small-town atmosphere but at the same time civic leaders work to find creative ways to attract new residents with winter and summer activities. The relatively low cost of living and efforts to balance rural roots with new technology and corporate influences have aimed to maintain quality of life as the community grows and changes. The town's estimated population in 2023 was 655, according to the state Office of Financial Management.
