Longview

Monticello on the Delta

An old black walnut tree on Third Avenue marks the site of the 1852 Monticello Convention, commemorated in 2006 as the birthplace of Washington Territory.⁵ The city stands where the Cowlitz meets the Columbia in western Cowlitz County, 66 miles upriver from the Pacific Ocean, and HistoryLink reports that wood and paper manufacturing is still its main industry.²

The Hudson’s Bay Company came first: the National Register nomination dates its Cowlitz Farm of 600-700 acres to 1837, and the 1950 Federal Writers’ Project guide has the company building two warehouses on the site in 1846-7 for hides, wool, furs, and wheat.^3,4 In 1849 two American settlers, Jonathan Durbee and H. D. Huntington, took up claims near the present city, and by 1852 logging camps had sprung up, their cuts moved by sailing ships that made their way up the Columbia without difficulty.⁴ On November 25, 1852, delegates met at Harry Darby Huntington’s home at Monticello and drafted a plea for a new territory to be called Columbia, and partly as a result Congress created the Territory of Washington.^1,3,4 Monticello became seat of the new Cowlitz County in 1854, but the high water of 1867 destroyed it, and the 1950 guide says the fear of floods kept settlers away afterward.^1,4

R. A. Long’s Planned City

Robert Alexander Long, a Kansas City timber baron and president of the Long-Bell Lumber Company, had left a Kentucky farm in 1873, and by 1918 his company’s timber in Texas and Louisiana was nearly exhausted.^2,3 Long-Bell bought Cowlitz County timber from Weyerhaeuser in 1919, and in 1922 Long spent $2.6 million for 14,000 acres in 245 separate pieces of property, though HistoryLink’s account of the Allen Street Bridge has the company buying 11,000 acres in 1921.^1,6 Long did not want a squalid mill town to spring up beside his mill, and with guidance from Kansas City developer J. C. Nichols he embarked on a planned community.^1,2 Dikes and drainage canals cost another $3.25 million, and the 1950 guide tells how sloughs and swamps became sunken gardens and a chain of lakes.^1,4 HistoryLink’s city history says Longview was named after Long’s 1,600-acre horse farm in Lees Summit, Missouri, while its county history says only that every name considered, Long-Bell and Longport among them, carried the name Long.^1,2 Another Long View already existed, a flag stop in Benton County serving three rural families, which gave up the name for a $25 covered platform to protect mail sacks, and the name became official in January 1923.²

On January 3, 1923, the Allen Street Bridge in Kelso collapsed into the Cowlitz River under workers returning home, the coroner counted two dead and 18 missing, and HistoryLink calls it, in terms of fatalities, Washington’s worst bridge disaster.⁶ The six-story Hotel Monticello opened on July 23, 1923, its 200 rooms lodging prospective residents and business people looking for property.² The town was dedicated in July 1923, a census that December counted 3,724 people, and on February 14, 1924, Longview incorporated as a third-class city, though Long-Bell owned all the land and paid most of the taxes.^1,2

Mills, Port, and Bridge on the Columbia

The Long-Bell mill opened in June 1924, as the county history has it the largest lumber producer in the world, and at that summer’s Pageant of Progress visitors watched from catwalks as giant Douglas firs were sawed into lumber.^1,2 Longview Fibre began making kraft paper from Long-Bell’s sawdust in 1927, and Weyerhaeuser opened its mill next door in June 1929 on the site of Mount Coffin, which was dynamited for gravel and building stone.^1,2 County voters chose the foot of Oregon Way for the Port of Kelso’s new dock on August 1, 1925, the dock was dedicated on April 15, 1926, and on December 7, 1929, voters renamed it the Port of Longview.⁷ On March 29, 1930, President Herbert Hoover turned a telegraphic key in the other Washington, and a knife cut a chain of daffodils along the Longview Bridge to Rainier, Oregon, later renamed the Lewis and Clark Bridge.⁸

Depression, War, and the End of Long-Bell

The lumber market slumped in 1927, and the 1930 census found 10,652 people, far short of the 30,000 expected and the 50,000 the city was planned for.² In December 1933 the Cowlitz River flooded and washed out sections of the LP&N tracks and railroad drawbridge, and the empty train depot became Cowlitz General Hospital in 1935 and was demolished in 1968.² In 1940 Reynolds Metals Company built an aluminum plant employing some 500 workers, and during World War II Weyerhaeuser made thousands of tons of bleached sulfite pulp for the War Production Board to make smokeless gunpowder.^2,7 In 1950 the Federal Writers’ Project guide, calling Longview the first planned city in the Pacific Northwest, counted 12,385 people, seventy per cent of them employed in lumber mills, and mill smokestacks 300 feet high visible for miles.⁴ International Paper bought Long-Bell’s remaining holdings in 1956, and in 1960, with the old-growth fir and cedar depleted, the Longview mills were closed and dismantled.²

The Library, the Theatre, and the Squirrel Bridge

The Public Library, Long’s gift to the city and the second building to face the Civic Center, is Georgian Revival and listed on the National Register of Historic Places.⁹ A thematic National Register nomination gathered 18 properties and one historic district from the city’s first dozen years, 1923 to 1935.³ The Columbia Theatre was spared from demolition when the eruption of Mount St. Helens on May 18, 1980, pulled the contractor away, and the city bought it on December 9, 1982.¹⁰ Over Olympia Way hangs the Nutty Narrows Bridge, 60 feet of aluminum tubing with a fire hose for its roadway, which Amos Peters conceived after seeing too many squirrels killed crossing the street; it was added to the National Register in 2014.¹¹