Lewis County Economic History
The following history is excerpted from The History of Lewis County Washington, edited by Alma and John Nix; Washington: A Centennial History, by Robert E. Ficken and Charles P. LeWarne; and Centralia, The First Fifty Years, Herndon Smith, compiler.

The first economic activity in what is now Lewis County was trade. The Cowlitz and Chehalis Indians had developed an extensive trading system between the many sub-tribes that they consisted of, and with other peoples from quite a distance away. Both tribes were river-dependent; that is, they relied upon the rivers for the mainstay of their diet: salmon. Consequently, they developed into expert canoemen and fishermen.

Salmon, and particularly dried salmon, was their main food and their primary export. The Upper Cowlitz people, who had horses and so were more mobile and less dependent upon the rivers, would even trade with the Yakimas for roots, herbs, and berries. The Chehalis remained with the rivers to a greater degree and developed a trading route that went from the Cowlitz River system to the Chehalis river system. This canoe route with its relatively easy portages was used well into the 19th century (by whites as well as Native Americans) when the first road was built from Fort Vancouver to Fort Nisqually by the U.S. military.

Although the Native American population in Lewis County is hard to determine, one report indicates that a gathering of the Upper Chehalis tribe at Ford's Prairie in 1855 was 5,000 strong. Twenty years later, Sydney Ford, an early settler and Indian Agent whose district included Lewis County, lamented that the Indian population in western Washington south of Puget Sound had decreased to only 1,200 people. Small pox, measles, the flu, venereal disease, and alcohol-related health problems had decimated the once thriving river communities. The bulk of the Indian people had been moved to the Chehalis Reservation in adjacent Grays Harbor County in 1864.

After late-18th century sea explorations by Europeans and Americans, Washington started yielding to Western style economics in the form of the Hudson's Bay Company's fur trapping and trading activities. With outposts at Vancouver and Nisqually, fur trappers scoured much of Lewis County in the early-1800s searching for salable pelts, and were firmly entrenched when Americans started arriving in the 1840s to farm and settle the area.

In fact, it was Simon Plomondon, a Hudson's Bay Company agent, who became the first white settler in Lewis County. After scouting the Cowlitz River area for the Company, he decided to settle there and established a homestead near present-day Toledo, probably around 1820. In 1825, the Hudson's Bay Company established a farm on Cowlitz Prairie - Dr. John Mclaughlin was the overseer.

In 1845 the Oregon territorial government created Lewis County, naming it after Meriwether Lewis, the famed explorer who had passed through the Jackson Prairie area. What they created resembles the present-day county only in name: it extended from the Columbia River to the southern boundary of then Russian Alaska; from the Pacific Ocean to the Cascades. The British, believing they owned much of this territory, were not amused. After much wrangling and saber-rattling (the fifty-four forty in Fifty-four Forty or Fight referred to Lewis County's northern border), the boundaries were redrawn in 1851 and again in 1861 to those still in effect today. In the interim, the Washington Territory had been established and Lewis County became a part of Washington rather than the Oregon Territory. Among the earliest settlers were George Waunch, a German immigrant (1845); Schuyler Saunders (1851), who founded the town of Saundersville, which eventually became Chehalis; and George Washington (1852), who platted the land that became Centerville, later renamed Centralia.

The U.S. government actively encouraged settlement of this region - more U.S. citizens living in the area gave the U.S. a more valid claim to the territory. Furthermore, this was the period of Manifest Destiny when many believed it was the right, the duty, and the obligation of the U.S. to settle the West. To encourage settlement even more, Congress passed the Donation Land Claim Act in 1850, which bestowed U.S. recognition upon land claims of settlers - 320 acres for a single person and 640 acres for a married couple.

Settlers arriving in Lewis County, for the most part coming up from Oregon, chose the land on prairies and the fertile areas near the Cowlitz and Chehalis rivers valleys. Like the Indians before them, many became fishermen and salmon became a large part of their diet. However, some were interested in permanent settlements and agriculture. The prairies had been selected because little clearing was necessary in order to start farming; the river plains, though, required substantial clearing and an incipient logging business began. Logging and agriculture, over time, became the dominant industries in Lewis County. Mining also assumed some importance with the discovery of fairly high-grade coal deposits.

Agriculture in Lewis County, as in most frontier areas, started as subsistence farming. Farm sites were relatively small, compared to today's, and were practically self-sufficient. Once the subsistence level was passed and surpluses were available to sell, farmers relied upon the waterways to get their crops to market. Hand powered boats (bateaux and canoes) plied the Cowlitz until 1861 when the first steamboat began operating on the river. Steamboats carried the bulk of passenger and freight traffic throughout the area until 1872 when the railroad arrived in the Twin Cities (Centralia and Chehalis) from Kalama, Oregon. The link all the way to Tacoma was completed in 1880.

The arrival of the railroad spurred immigration even more; the late 19th century in Lewis County was a period of growth, construction, and prosperity (Centralia's population expanded from 700 to 3,200 in one year, 1889). The depression of 1893 decimated the county, though. Eastern investment money dried up, the railroads stopped expanding, mills closed, and people left as fast as they had come.

Going into the new century, the county had recovered from the collapse of '93. Roads were paved, highways built, the population started growing again, and there was an air of general prosperity. After a number of failed attempts in the 1800s, coal mining became profitable and a number of mines operated, employing a substantial number of people. During the first quarter of the century, agriculture started changing; horses gave way to tractors, new farming methods were introduced, and the small family farm was eclipsed by agribusiness. Large dairy farms became prevalent, hop farming and berry farms proliferated, and egg production and poultry farming flourished. Railroads extended the range of logging away from the rivers systems, where logs could be floated to mills, and into previously untapped regions. And, fortuitously, the arrival of the transcontinental railroad to Washington coincided with the depletion of the Great Lakes forests - Washington was soon the leading producer of timber in the nation, and Lewis County got its share of that prosperity.

The 1920s, though, did not roar as loudly for the Pacific Northwest as they did for the rest of the nation. Washington and Lewis County were harbingers of the Great Depression. Farm prices fell dramatically after the war; farmers who had extended themselves when prices were high, believing they would remain high, found themselves financially strapped. Also, prohibition had effectively destroyed hop production in Lewis County. Coupled with this, the timber industry was not doing well - overproduction had depressed prices and resulted in cutbacks that affected the economy of the region. The ensuing depression only greatly exacerbated an existing trend.

Washington's lumber production dropped from 7.3 billion feet to 2.2 billion feet in a three-year period. Employment in the industry was, in 1932, less than half of what it was in the late-1920s. The average value of a farm dropped by more than 50 percent from 1920 to 1935, even while more acreage was being put under cultivation. Lewis County, historically dominated by farming and logging, was hit as hard as anyplace in the nation by the depression.

It took World War II to bring full employment back to the county. Demand for timber and food stuffs, occasioned by the war, revived these moribund industries. Further, many people working in the busy Tacoma shipyards were commuters from Lewis County. Following the war, the 1950s and 1960s saw several significant developments in the economy of the county. Highway 12 was completed, permitting easy east-west travel and linking the county with eastern Washington. Interstate 5 was also completed and became the major north-south conduit going through the county. A series of dams and hydroelectric plants were built on the Cowlitz River during the 1960s and in 1971 the Centralia Steam-Electric Plant was opened (its use of coal-fired boilers may seem anachronistic, but the nearby supply of coal makes it possible for the plant to generate 1.4 megawatts of electricity).

Presently, Lewis County's economy can probably be best viewed as one in transition. While much of the county is still given over to agriculture, the significance of the timber industry has been declining. Great gains over the past couple of decades in efficiency have decreased employment, and environmental concerns will likely cause more cutbacks in the future. On the other hand, there have been significant increases in light industry (both Chehalis and Centralia have developed industrial parks and one is planned for Morton) and retail trade. The county is making the transition between a resource based, extractive economy to one with an emphasis on light manufacturing and commerce.