Like more than 2 million tourists each year, my husband and I traveled last weekend northeast to Leavenworth, a once-dying town that reinvented itself in the 1960s as a Bavarian-style village.
Every top-10 list of places to visit in Washington I’ve seen includes Leavenworth in the Central Cascades, once home to the Yakama, Chinook and Wenatchi tribes. Settlers arrived in the late 19th century, seeking gold, timber and furs, followed by construction of a rail line, sawmills and logging businesses.
“At that point, Leavenworth was a whole lot less Bavaria and a whole lot more Deadwood!” the town’s website states.
When the railroad left, Leavenworth nearly became a ghost town. Then, in the early 1960s, leaders decided to create a Bavarian city tucked in the Cascade Range and host annual events throughout the year to attract tourists.
“To say the change worked is like saying you can taste a hint of cabbage in kraut,” the website states, noting that for decades tourists have flocked to the town of 2,500.
While bringing jobs and money, tourism carries a downside, highlighted in a June 10 article in The Center Square. It noted that Leavenworth’s popularity is pricing out the locals with the median property value in 2022 at just under $500,000. The mayor announced workshops this September to figure out how to balance prosperity with preservation of the community.
For the former sleepy community of Forks, Washington, author Stephanie Meyer’s decision more than 20 years ago to base her bestselling Twilight vampire series on the rainy Olympic Peninsula boosted tourism from 5,000 a year to a high of 73,000 in 2010. It provided a financial boost to the community. But a Business Insider article published on Saturday stated some local residents, irritated by cars clogging the streets and visitors buying all the flashlights in local hardware stores to search the woods for vampires and werewolves, would prefer to “put an end to the ‘vampire tourism’ boom.”
We were among the Twilight tourists in August 2011 when a friend and I took our daughters to the Olympic Peninsula to visit sites mentioned in the books. When we stopped at the visitor center, a woman held up a map with pins showing where tourists traveled from to see settings in the novels.
With more than 160 million books sold worldwide by 2021, the Twilight series continues to draw people to the Olympic Peninsula, with more than 66,000 people visiting Forks last year.
Discover Lewis County in May announced that more than 5.6 million people visited Lewis County in 2023, an increase of 5.8 % over the previous year. That’s countywide, not a particular city or town. More than half traveled from throughout Washington state, and most were drawn to the county by Mount Rainier or the shopping districts in Centralia and Chehalis. Summer brought the largest number of tourists.
Discover Lewis County, which operates under the Economic Alliance of Lewis County, is expanding town-specific marketing, according to the report.
Fellow columnist Brian Mittge has done a great job highlighting top outdoor spots in the region.
I’d like to see Lewis County capitalize more on its rich history.
After all, we are the mother of all counties in Washington state, with our boundaries once stretching from the Cowlitz River north to Sitka, Alaska, and from the Pacific Ocean to the Cascades.
The Chehalis, Cowlitz and Yakama tribes all called this region home. Five thousand Native Americans once lived in villages on both sides of the Cowlitz River near Toledo. Other villages nestled near the mouths of Lincoln, Scatter and Cedar creeks and the Chehalis, Skookumchuck and Black rivers.
The county is named for the Corps of Discovery’s Captain Meriwether Lewis. It is home to the first Catholic mission established in Washington Territory, and many early pioneers rest in the St. Francis Xavier Mission Cemetery. The Hudson’s Bay Company’s Cowlitz Farm operated by the Puget Sound Agricultural Company once spread across more than 4,000 acres on the prairies near Toledo.
John R. Jackson, a British native but naturalized American, was the first to file a claim north of Fort Vancouver in 1845, and it was in his small cabin where the first county commissioners gathered on Oct. 4, 1847. His place is also home to Washington Territory’s first courthouse.
The first brick kiln and sawmill in the county were built at Cowlitz Landing south of Toledo. Ruts from the Cowlitz Trail between Toledo and Fort Nisqually remain visible in Lewis and Clark State Park just south of the historic Jackson Courthouse.
On Aug. 29, 1851, early settlers gathered at Cowlitz Landing for what became known as the Cowlitz Convention, where 26 men signed a petition asking Congress to divide Oregon Territory to create a northern territory called “Columbia” — a year before the Monticello Convention in present-day Longview requested a similar change.
The first United States flag flown in the newly created Washington Territory was raised at Toledo in 1853. The oldest church building in the state is at Claquato, a Methodist church erected in 1857. Centralia is the largest city in the United States founded by an African American.
Our rich history goes on and on — with Simon Plamondon, George Washington, Billy Packwood, Schuyler and Eliza Saunders, William West, the Jacksons, the Alexanders, the Urquharts and so many more early pioneers. We also have the controversial 1919 tragedy in Centralia with monuments in George Washington Park to victims on all sides of that fateful clash between American Legionnaires and the Industrial Workers of the World.
While I love to preserve our history in books, it would be nice to see the community capitalize on it somehow and share it with visitors. The annual Lewis County Historical Ride for bicyclists held before Mother’s Day each year is a start, but we could do so much more.
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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at memoirs@chaptersoflife.com.
