The first purpose-built company town in Washington Territory's timber industry was Teekalet (now Port Gamble), a sawmill-centered community founded in 1853. By 1860 there were numerous sawmills in operation and dozens of logging camps, but little documentation of other company towns. This was the era of tideland logging; with only oxen and horses to drag felled trees through rough terrain, logging was confined to within a mile or two of a shore where logs could be boomed up and floated to a mill. Two inventions patented in 1881 – the Dolbeer donkey engine and the Shay locomotive – revolutionized the industry, opening previously unworkable areas to logging. From the late 1880s to as recently as the 1940s, dozens of company-owned towns were established in Washington. The character of each was dictated by its founders, usually one or a small group of rich and powerful men. During the first half of the twentieth century, workers gained progressively more bargaining clout, and improved roads and rails freed them from being tied to place. By mid-century timber resources were becoming scarcer and the need for conservation more compelling. As the benefits of company towns to their owners decreased, their numbers shrank. Some survived as small communities, but most simply disappeared – a few fondly recalled, some unmourned, and many unremembered.
Industry Overview
The first phase of the exploitation of Washington's forests had almost zero impact on the vast resource. Native Americans harvested trees for a variety of purposes and passing ships took a few for repairs. The Hudson's Bay Company opened the first sawmill in the Pacific Northwest at Fort Vancouver in 1828. In 1847, a handful of the first pioneers to create a community north of the Columbia River started a water-driven sawmill on the Deschutes River near Olympia. The sea of trees that covered the land from the Cascades to the Pacific Ocean was barely touched.
A second phase began in 1848 with the California Gold Rush. The booming Bay Area's need for lumber seemed insatiable. In March 1853 Henry Yesler (1810?-1892) fired up his steam mill on Seattle's waterfront, and others soon followed. By 1860 more than two dozen steam sawmills, most owned by California-based investors, were operating on Puget Sound. Adding to the demand, between 1849 and 1851 San Francisco was struck by six catastrophic fires, each causing massive damage to the town and its waterfront.
The third phase began in the 1880s, when new steam-powered equipment made logging possible in previously inaccessible areas. Soon thereafter the coming of the railroads opened up untouched forests and stimulated exports to eastern states. By the turn of the century, lumber dominated the state's economy, and would for decades. Over the next half century, dozens of company-owned timber towns were established throughout Western Washington, and a few east of the Cascades.
The fourth phase began in 1940, on the eve of America's entry into World War II. The war supercharged the demand for wood, and the supply of suitable trees, once thought inexhaustible, proved not to be. Environmental and conservation concerns came to the fore, leading to large tracts of marketable timber being placed off-limits. Unions, long and aggressively barred from the industry, gained recognition in the second and third decade of the twentieth century. Many mills closed; others turned to pulp and paper production. Company-owned towns became increasingly irrelevant, no longer an asset but a liability, and one by one they were abandoned or converted to other purposes.
The Early Days
The concept of company-owned towns appeared first in eighteenth-century Britain during the Industrial Revolution. Their purpose was to ensure a reliable and essentially captive workforce by providing employees and their families access to housing, food, and a variable range of other services (almost always at a cost). The concept soon spread throughout Europe and North America. In the eastern U.S., some of the first company towns were created by large manufacturing concerns, the most notable being the Pullman Company in Illinois, which produced passenger cars for the railroads. As the frontier moved west into resource-rich lands, company towns became most common in the extractive industries, notably mining and logging.
There is no precise count of the number of company towns that existed in Washington before the late 1880s (or after, for that matter). The first was founded in 1853 at Port Gamble by California's Puget Mill Company. There is then a gap in the record, but 12 years later, in September 1865, author Caroline C. Leighton, touring Puget Sound by ship with her husband and children, noted a number of communities that bore the hallmarks of company towns:
"Everywhere about Puget Sound and the adjoining waters are little arms of the sea running up into the land, like the fiords of Northern Europe. Many of them have large sawmills at the head … [It appeared] as if we might perhaps be living in feudal times, these great mill-owners have such authority in the settlements. Some of them … have hundreds of men in their employ, own steamboats and hotels, and have large stores of general merchandise, in connection with their mill-business. They sometimes provide amusements for the men – little dramatic entertainments, etc., to keep them from resorting to alcohol; and encourage them to send for their families, and to make gardens around their houses" (Leighton, 17).
Two decades after Leighton's observations, Washington Territory was still far from the top ranks of the nation's timber producers. Antiquated methods and the difficulty and expense of wrestling huge trees from wilderness to mill by animal power alone held back the industry's growth. Most sawmills were by necessity tidewater operations: A sawmill was built on the shore and logging crews would first harvest the trees closest to the mill, then move inland. But not too far inland. Oxen and horses could drag the huge logs only a mile or two before exhaustion, were slow, could not work on steep terrain, and were expensive to maintain.
Trees were also harvested along rivers of sufficient size and flow to carry logs to the saltwater to be boomed up and taken to mills. But here too oxen and horses were of limited use, and useless on steep ground. Not until the late 1880s did technology facilitate the harvesting of more remote tracts of prime timber (including most of the largest trees). As late as 1888 (a year before statehood), "the Pacific Northwestern lumber industry was still in its infancy, cutting less than 10% of the nation's timber … Rumors of how the new steam powered machinery would transform cutting began to circulate" (Beda, 25).
Steam Revolution
The first of the "new steam powered machinery" were two devices patented in 1881 that would revolutionize the timber industry, doom virgin forests, create huge fortunes, and spur the development of dozens of company towns.
The steam-powered Dolbeer donkey engine was a large, single-cylinder steam engine connected to a horizontal or vertical capstan (rotating drum). Heavy rope or steel cables were wrapped around the capstan and could reel in huge logs with relative ease. The entire device – boiler, engine, and capstan – was mounted on heavy log skids so it could winch itself to new locations, moving felled trees in stages over long distances.
The second invention was the Shay locomotive, purpose-built for logging and mining. Its wheels were gear-driven, and all wheels were powered. Each set of wheels (called a "truck") could swivel and follow the tracks independently, providing traction and stability on challenging terrain and uneven ground. Felled trees could now be dragged out of the forest by the donkey engines and loaded onto Shays to be taken directly to mills or, in later years, to gathering places to be loaded onto trucks or trains.
What Made a Town a Company Town?
There appears to be no uniform definition of a company town. Historian James B. Alan, while acknowledging myriad variations on a basic theme, suggested the simplest definition – "any community which is owned and controlled by a particular company" (Alan, 6). Author Linda Carlson posits a more functional test – whether company-owned or company-dominated towns "developed into cohesive communities, with Boy Scouts and Bible study, baby showers and baseball teams, card clubs, volunteer fire departments, and many of the other characteristics of small towns" (Carlson, 7).
As logging moved into more remote areas, company towns were born of necessity. In the early days, when tideland logging was the norm, most workers were single men living in temporary logging camps. These typically had portable accommodations and mess halls (often mounted on wheels or skids for ease of relocation), but were lacking most of the amenities found later in company towns. When an area was cut clean, buildings and personnel would be moved to a new location.
Logging was arduous, dangerous, and often poorly compensated. Much of the work was done far from settled communities, remote places where workers were hard to find and harder to keep. If dissatisfied, an employee could simply move on to another of the region's scattered mills and camps. The turnover was tremendous, and inefficient. It was said that "Logging camps with poor living standards and meager food were said to have three crews: 'one coming, one going, and one working'" (Bass, 34).
Washington became a state in November 1889, and it was about this time that the golden age of the state's timber industry began. From then and up through the 1940s, dozens of company towns became home to timber-industry workers and their families. The workforce stabilized, companies prospered, and true communities came into being.
But company towns were not democratic in any meaningful sense. They were uniformly patriarchal. A town's character, customs, and practices were shaped by the attitudes and prejudices of the company (often a single individual) that owned them. Owners were not motivated by benevolence for the comfort and well-being of workers or their families (although some were more solicitous of these concerns than others), but rather by enlightened self-interest. Company towns attracted a more stable workforce and fostered feelings of permanence and community in a still-raw land, making employees and their families dependent on, and thereby loyal to, the company.
Most but not all company towns were located at sawmill sites. Given their variability, a few examples must suffice to illustrate what they had and did not have in common.
Port Gamble: Port Gamble deserves pride of place in any discussion of company-owned towns in Washington. It was the first in the Northwest (perhaps in the entire West), possibly the finest, and it outlasted all others – the sawmill operated for 142 years, almost always under the same ownership, finally ceasing production in 1995 as the oldest continuous operating mill in North America. It is recognized as "the finest surviving example of [the] region's many 19th century lumber towns" ("NRHP Nomination Form: Significance").
In 1849, Andrew Jackson Pope (1820-1878) and Captain William Talbot (1816-1881), both from East Machias, Maine, founded the Pope & Talbot Company in San Francisco to supply lumber to the Bay Area (and other markets). At the entrance to Gamble Bay on the Kitsap Peninsula, a sandspit provided a good site for a steam-powered sawmill. Inside the bay's entrance there was sheltered anchorage for ships, and rich stands of timber fringed the entire bay and nearby waters. Pope & Talbot formed a subsidiary, the Puget Mill Company, and by September 1853 production began.
Given the site's remoteness, there was little choice but to establish a company town to provide housing and other necessities of life for workers and management. Finding experienced mill hands was a challenge. Kitsap County was at that time part of King County. The entire county had a population of 170, with only 111 men aged 21 or older. There were no roads, no railroads, no public transportation. Pope & Talbot recruited experienced mill workers from Maine, offering free passage and six-month contracts. The first 10 men recruited arrived in the summer of 1853 and built the first mill, a cookhouse, a bunkhouse, and a store. Talbot named the mill and town Teekalet, a S'Klallam word, but changed it to Port Gamble in 1868.
Over the following decades, Pope & Talbot built pretty much everything necessary to a frontier town – a general store, church, Masonic lodge, schoolhouse, hotel for visitors, and housing, with bunkhouses for single men, small homes for families, and large, often ornate houses for managers. Alcohol was not banned but discouraged, and men seeking female companionship had to row across the bay to Little Boston, a small Native American community built with company-donated lumber by S'Klallam men who worked at the mill.
Port Gamble, town and mill, were steadily improved over the years. Beginning in the late 1860s, after basic needs were met, the houses and other structures were frequently built in styles common in Maine. The large community hall, built in 1907, was designed by the prominent Seattle architectural firm Bebb and Mendel. It still stands, along with the store, a number of homes, and other buildings. Port Gamble has been recognized as a National Historic District since 1966.
Camp Grisdale: Camp Grisdale, owned for its entire existence by the Simpson Timber Company, illustrates the ambiguity of the category "company towns." Unlike most company towns, Grisdale was not located near a sawmill, but rather high in the southern foothills of the Olympic Range in Grays Harbor County, about 25 miles northwest of Simpson Timber's sawmills at Shelton in Mason County. It was always referred to as a camp, not a town, but a town it was.
Camp Grisdale came into being in 1946, late in the last great era of Northwest logging, and was a transfer station for logs taken from the foothills of the South Olympics. Simpson Timber had built a network of railroads from Shelton into the woods to the west. Every few miles along the tracks, a numbered mobile logging camp was stationed ready to pull up stakes and follow the cut ever deeper into the woods. But Camp Grisdale, the only one graced with a name rather than a number, was different. It was the nexus between forest and mill, the place where timber harvested from high-country logging was brought out of the hills on trucks and transferred to company trains bound for the sawmills of Shelton.
Grisdale's buildings were fixed to the ground, not mobile. There were bunkhouses that held 300 single men, with "hot and cold running water, thick mattresses, and a bed maker who shook out the sheets and fluffed the pillows every day" ("Remember Grisdale"). George Lincoln Drake (1889-1979), Simpson's chief forester, wanted "a neat town with houses designed to attract housewives: 'To keep a good man, you've got to please his wife'" ("Remember Grisdale"). Fifty family homes were built, renting in the early days for $20 or $30 a month. There was a company store, a recreation hall, and a two-classroom school that taught eight grades and hosted church services on Sundays. The recreation hall offered a "bowling alley, a movie theater, billiards, and card tables" ("Remember Grisdale"). And a dance floor. The only thing Grisdale lacked was its own doctor, but Aberdeen was barely more than 25 miles distant.
Despite being remote and having the dank distinction of the heaviest annual rainfall in the continental United States, Grisdale was by all accounts a happy place. But the industry was changing. By 1982 the bunkhouses and cookhouse were closed. The remaining families were told to relocate by the next school year, and the camp was shut down fully by 1986, celebrated as "the last logging camp in the Northwest" ("NW Had 900 …"). Some couples who came to Camp Grisdale as newlyweds had been there for years and were among the last to leave. In 1988 all remaining buildings were razed and the site returned to nature.
Today (2025) Grisdale is less than a ghost town; a row of rusted mailboxes still stands as almost the only evidence that here once was a vibrant community. Up until at least 2009, former residents of Grisdale maintained a Facebook page and had annual reunions, but by 2025 both traditions seemed to have gone the way of the camp.
McCleary: Henry McCleary (1861-1943), born into a sawmilling family, came west from his native Ohio in 1899 and began cutting and milling in Grays Harbor County from a logging camp he called Camp McCleary. In 1905 McCleary expanded his operation by taking in a partner, and together they built a plywood mill and what for decades was the world's largest fir-door factory. Camp McCleary soon became a company town known simply as McCleary. In 1915 McCleary bought out his partner and became the sole owner of the mills and the unchallenged ruler of the town. Although showing occasional flashes of benevolence to individuals in distress, McCleary gained a reputation as a humorless despot. Steven Beda, in a 2014 Ph.D. dissertation, pulls no punches:
"The town had been named after its founder Henry McCleary, a real bastard of a human being whose managerial philosophy made him more feudal lord than twentieth century industrialist. 'A good kingdom is better than a poor democracy,' he was fond of saying. Workers in McCleary's sawmills and logging operations were among the lowest-paid in the regional timber industry and even then returned most of their earnings to the company for rent" (Beda, 84).
Nor did McCleary spend lavishly on workers' housing. Angelo Pellegrini (1903-1991), later a university professor and popular cookbook author, arrived in McCleary as a 13-year-old immigrant from Italy. He recalled, "The houses were rectangular insecurities of wood, unpainted, in various stages of dilapidation" (quoted in Carlson, p. 27).
The town of McCleary had some uncommon aspects. Unlike most company towns, McCleary did not own all of the land or buildings. During labor unrest in 1935, the owner of the town saloon allowed union members and organizers to meet in his establishment. McCleary, unable to simply evict him, had to be satisfied with cutting off his utilities and prevailing on the state police and liquor authorities to harass the man. An organizer for the International Woodworkers of America wrote, "never a feudal baron of the dark ages ruled his land more despotically than McCleary Timber Co. rules McCleary" ("The Little Kingdom …").
McCleary was also much more tolerant of vice than most company towns. Liquor was liberally allowed, even during Prohibition. A longtime employee, Ernest Teagle, was quoted as saying, "When the nation went dry, McCleary went wet" (Carlson, 99). Henry McCleary was known to post bail for employees who were caught selling the product of stills hidden in the surrounding woods. Gambling and prostitution were also tolerated, a rarity in company towns.
And it was unusual, if not unique, in another way. The McCleary mill flourished throughout the 1920s and 1930s. By 1941 its timberlands were depleted and Henry McCleary sold the town, the mills, and the lands to Simpson Timber Company. The last days of company towns were anticipated, and Simpson did not want to own another one. It sold off the houses and other structures, many to the workers who were living in them. In 1942 the voters of McCleary incorporated the town, perhaps the only former company town that did so. It survives today (2025) as a municipality with a population of about 2,000.
Onalaska: Another logging town that was atypical and has survived is Onalaska in Lewis County. The town was founded in 1916 when the Carlisle Lumber Company, a multistate organization, built its second sawmill in Lewis County, naming the adjacent town Onalaska (after Unalaska in the Aleutian Islands; the company also established sawmills and towns of the same name in Wisconsin, Arkansas, and Texas). Like most large lumber companies, Carlisle was rabidly anti-union, and matters came to a violent climax in the mid-1930s:
"During the 1930s, the town was the scene of a long and bitter labor dispute. During the general northwest lumber strike of 1935, the company replaced the striking mill hands with non-union crews, who were formed into an employees' association, or company union. The controversy resulted in several clashes between strikers on the one hand and the railroad police and the Washington State Patrol on the other. The strike continued until 1938, when the company began reinstatement of the strikers in accordance with a decision of the United States Supreme Court upholding the major portions of the findings of the National Labor Relations Board" ("Onalaska").
The sawmill closed in 1942. One factor was a large number of employees of Japanese descent (who lived in segregated areas and were paid less than other employees). When they were incarcerated after Pearl Harbor, the company lost a significant part of its workforce. When the mill closed, most company-owned structures were razed, but the company-built houses were sold to their former employees. And unlike most company towns, some of the merchants were independent operators, not owned by the lumber company. Onalaska thus retained some of its population and the businesses to sustain it. It exists today (2025) as an unincorporated community with about 650 residents.
Going, Going, Gone
In his 1932 novel, Light in August, William Faulkner described the fate of many timber-company towns:
"All the men in the village worked in the mill or for it. It was cutting pine. It had been there seven years and in seven years more it would destroy all the timber within its reach. Then some of the machinery and most of the men who ran it and existed because of and for it would be loaded onto freight cars and moved away ... [leaving] ... a stump pocked scene of profound and peaceful desolation ... Then the hamlet which in its best day had borne no name listed on Post Office Department annals would not now even be remembered by [those] who pulled the buildings down and burned them …" (Faulkner, 4).
Faulkner was writing of the South, but many company towns in Washington suffered the same fate of diminishing resources. But there were other reasons as well. The nineteenth-century development of company timber towns in the Northwest was spurred in the main by the absence of roads, railroads, or public transportation that could deliver workers to where the choice forests were to be found. As the coming of the railroads in the waning years of the nineteenth century began to overcome this lack, the towns became increasingly unnecessary. When roads were built and automobile ownership became common, the pace of closures accelerated. The following random selection of timber company towns illustrates both the trend of disappearances and a few outliers and survivors:
Alpine, Alpine Lumber Company (Snohomish County) early 1900s. Razed in 1929.
Barneston, Kent Lumber Company (King County) 1898-1920s). Razed in 1924.
Bourdeaux, Mason County Logging Company (Thurston County) 1890s-1941. Ghost town.
Carlsborg, Carlsborg Mill and Timber Company (Clallam County) 1915-1968. Small unincorporated community.
Dalkena, Dalton and Kennedy Milling Company (Pend Oreille County) 1902-1930s. Small unincorporated community.
Dryad, Lendinghaus Lumber Company (Lewis County) late 1800s-1939. Small unincorporated community.
Kosmos, Kosmos Timber Company (Lewis County) 1935-1969. Flooded by completion of Mossyrock Dam in 1969.
Montezuma, Manley-Moore Lumber Company (Pierce County) 1910-1935. Abandoned.
National, Pacific National Lumber Company (Pierce County) early 1900s-1957. Townsite shut down after purchase by Weyerhaeuser.
Pilchuck, Parker-Bell Lumber Company (Snohomish County) 1900-1922. Ghost town.
Pysht, Merrill & Ring Lumber Company (Jefferson County) 1922-1944. No longer active, but in large part maintained.
Ryderwood, Long-Bell Lumber Company (Clallam County) 1922-1952. Now a retirement community.
Sappho, First platted 1895. Later owned by Bloedel-Donovan Lumber Company (Clallam County) 1924-1972. Small unincorporated community.
Seabeck, Washington Mill Company (Kitsap County) 1856-1886. Partially restored and home to Seabeck Conference Center.
One lingering advantage of company towns until the 1930s was the insulation they provided against union organizing. Those battles were eventually won by labor, backed by federal laws. After that, there was essentially zero advantage for companies to subsidize, sustain, or even maintain the dwindling number of owned towns, and one by one they were closed down, the sites sold off or, if on leased land, simply abandoned. Most returned to nature, some became ghost towns with ruined remnants of their pasts, and a few survive as small, usually unincorporated communities. Of those that still exist, only Port Gamble remains company-owned, now by Rayonier Inc. As of 2025, there were plans for extensive development of portions of the company's holdings at Port Gamble, while leaving intact and continuing to preserve the town's remaining historic houses and other buildings.
