Willapa Hills State Park Trail History

The 56-mile Willapa Hills State Park Trail weaves together a landscape steeped in stories of the land and the people that have made their lives in the southwest corner of today’s Washington.

The Willapa Hills

The rolling highlands of the Willapa Hills, overshadowed by the taller ice-chiseled peaks and volcanic cones of the Olympics and Cascades, have a unique geologic past of their own. The core of the hills is made up of basalt lava that was scraped off the ocean floor as the tectonic plate it was riding on sank beneath the North American continent. Rock outcrops on the outside edges of the Willapa Hills were put in place as molten lava flowed from the southeast corner of today’s Washington, all the way through the Columbia River Gorge, coming to rest and hardening in place on the margins of these hills.

The Willapa Hills feature copious rainfall spawned by their proximity to the Pacific Ocean. The weather inspired the name for a former railroad station stop near the highest point on today’s trail—“Pluvius,” a shortened form of an archaic epithet (“Jupiter Pluvius!”) referencing a Roman deity responsible for rainstorms. The Huckleberry Ridge automated weather station, located three miles south of Pluvius, has measured over 100 inches of rainfall annually in recent years. The runoff from the Willapa Hills flows east into the Chehalis River watershed and west into the Willapa River basin.

Indigenous Lands

The Willapa Hills State Park Trail meanders through the traditional territories of several Chinookan and Coast Salish Indigenous peoples whose present-day descendants include members of the Shoalwater Bay Indian Tribe, Confederated Tribes of the Chehalis Reservation and Cowlitz Indian Tribe.

For centuries, the natural prairie lands of the Upper Chehalis River Valley (between Littell and Pe Ell on today’s Willapa Hills State Park Trail) were the homelands of Indigenous people called Kwahlioqua by others. They spoke an Athapaskan language unlike the Salish-speaking people who surrounded them. Accounts by ethnographers and historians indicate that they made their living primarily by hunting deer and elk and gathering camas and other carefully tended plants in the prairies. 

Local tribes refused to accept the conditions proposed by Washington Territorial Governor Isaac Stevens at the Chehalis River Treaty Council in February 1855. Stevens had proposed that the Cowlitz, Chehalis and other Indigenous people move from their homelands to the Quinault Indian Reservation on the Pacific Ocean coast. Tribal leaders asked to negotiate for a reservation within their own traditional territory, but Governor Stevens refused.

Subsequently, title to the land was relinquished to the US federal government and the Chehalis Indian Reservation was established by executive order of Secretary of the Interior J. P. Usher on July 8, 1864.

On September 22, 1866, President Andrew Johnson established the Shoalwater Bay Reservation by executive order. The Cowlitz Indian Tribe received federal recognition in 2000.

Land Disposal

The Donation Land Claim Act, passed by the US Congress in 1850, encouraged Euro-American colonists to appropriate unceded Indigenous lands in today’s Washington. The law allowed married couples with the means to make the trip to the Pacific Northwest a reward of up to 640 acres of land at no cost. Within the territory, the treeless prairies that had been lovingly stewarded by Indigenous people for thousands of years were especially attractive to the colonists, as they did not have to clear the land to begin farming. The Indigenous residents of the prairies were displaced by the newcomers without payment. The Claquato Prairie area near the eastern part of today’s Willapa Hills State Park Trail was largely taken up by Donation Land Claims.

Though some families continued to farm their granted lands for generations, many more sold their property to pursue other options. Donation Land Claims in the area of Claquato Prairie were transformed into the lumber mill town of Littell, which grew to include dairies, a brickyard, three sawmills, and even an Opera House.

Later arrivals took advantage of other federal land disposal laws, such as the 1862 Homestead Act, to acquire lands for farming and other activities. Farms produced vegetables, grains and stock pasture. Hops, grown to supply breweries near and far, became a major focus for growers from Littell to Chehalis after 1888, continuing in the area even after major crop losses from aphid infestations affected other hop-growing regions in western Washington.

The Northern Pacific Railroad (NP) was granted alternate one-square-mile sections of land in a checkerboard pattern along most of the route of today’s Willapa Hills State Park Trail. The US Congress had approved the grant in 1864, which eventually conveyed nearly 40 million acres of public domain lands to subsidize the construction of railroad lines into the western states. Most lands were later sold to other private landowners.

Over 900,000 acres of NP grant lands in Washington were sold to Frederick Weyerhaeuser, who soon formed the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company from his newly acquired holdings.

Building a Railroad

Completion of the NP Railroad from the Great Lakes to Tacoma in 1887 spurred a race to connect other aspiring communities to the transportation network. The Yakima and Pacific Coast Railroad Company (Y & PC) was formed in 1890 to join Washington’s rich agricultural region east of the Cascades with the saltwater port at South Bend, through the Cascades and Willapa Hills. Boosters promoted the route as likely to establish South Bend as the primary seaport for the territory.

19 miles of the Y & PC Railroad were built (between Chehalis and Dryad) before transfer of ownership to the United Railroads of Washington (URW), which completed the route from Dryad on to South Bend by 1892. Construction supervisors noted that:

“The clearing and grubbing have been very heavy, as this entire country was covered with a dense growth of timber, large trees predominate and the undergrowth was luxuriant.”

The NP began operation of the line in 1893, tying the “South Bend Branch,” as it became known, to the broader NP network. The NP formally acquired ownership of the South Bend Branch on April 21, 1898. By 1907 the NP was running two full-sized passenger trains each way along the line, serving 29 communities. Some trains even featured a parlor car frequented by lumber company owners. Lumber freight from the many sawmills along the line, and seasonal agricultural goods filled the line’s freight trains.

Taking out the Timber

Logging of the “dense growth of timber” in the Willapa Hills had previously started with oxen teams and skids, soon followed by horse logging.

Laying a railroad through the Willapa Hills spurred a rapid increase in logging and processing of the region’s forests, often leaving damaged ecosystems in its wake. Logging operators used steam donkeys to drag felled logs across the ground to central landings and built spur railroads through the hills and valleys to transport logs from far-flung landings to the NP railroad line. Splash dams were built along watercourses to move logs from harvest areas to mill locations, altering stream habitats. Sawmills were developed to process raw logs into dimension lumber close to the NP railroad, taking advantage of its access to national markets. Small towns quickly grew around the mills and other manufacturing businesses as they were established.

• Littell: Wisconsin Lumber Company; Chehalis Lumber Company, Chester Snow Log & Shingle Company
• Adna: Adna Mill Company
• Dryad: Luedinghaus Brothers sawmill
• Doty: Doty Lumber and Shingle Company
• Pe Ell: Yeomans’ Lumber Company, plus two other sawmills, three shingle mills, a factory that supplied telephone poles, and a broom handle and wooden novelty item factory
• Meskill: J.R. Cain Lumber Company, Meskill Rock Quarry
• McCormick: H. McCormick Lumber Company
• Walville: Walworth & Neville Manufacturing Company
• Frances: Northwestern Lumber Company of San Francisco
• Globe: Globe sawmill
• Lebam: Lebam Mill and Timber Company
• Menlo: Mayfair Ranch Creamery 

Cosmopolitan Lumber Camps

The logging and millwork jobs in the Willapa Hills created a cluster of ethnically diverse boom-and-bust communities along the railway path. Labor needed to fulfill the rapid expansion of the logging industry in the Willapa Hills could not be met with local or regional workers, prompting the arrival of immigrants from throughout the United States and around the globe. 

Many Greek, Polish and German immigrants found jobs in mills in the Upper Chehalis Valley communities. Plants in Littell, McCormick and Walville employed many Japanese immigrants. Communities in the Upper Willapa River Valley attracted numerous Swiss and German immigrants, many of whom put down roots and stayed even after the first wave of logging was done and mills closed in the 1930s.

Most communities developed services for their residents, including postal service, stores, religious organizations, social clubs, and entertainment venues which hosted touring performers. Hazardous working conditions and exploitation of immigrant laborers fostered labor union organizations, including the International Workers of the World (IWW), which pressed for workers’ rights and benefits, in spite of often heavy-handed resistance from business owners and government.

Decline of the Railway

Lumber mill freight and passenger travel declined as the first wave of logging finished and reforestation had not yet grown trees of harvestable size. By 1912, present-day State Route 6 had been completed across the Willapa Hills, and growing automobile ownership led people to travel by car rather than train.

By the mid-1930s one-time boom towns at McCormick, Globe, and Walville had become ghost towns, and on many trips the coaches carried no paying passengers.

The final run of the mixed freight and passenger train traveled between Centralia and South Bend on March 19, 1954, with 14 passengers on board, mostly NP officials and railroad fans who paid the $2.54 fare to be a part of the last passenger run on the line.

Intermittent freight service continued on the line until 1990, when operations ceased, and the rails were pulled.

Making a Park

In 1983, concern over the rapid abandonment of thousands of miles of US rail corridors like the South Bend Branch spurred the US Congress to pass an amendment to the National Trails System Act to preserve rail corridors through a process called “railbanking.” Corridors that would otherwise be abandoned and converted to other uses can be preserved for future rail use by converting them to interim trails.

The South Bend Branch was railbanked, with ownership transferred to the Washington State Parks and Recreation Commission for trail development, on November 23, 1993.

Willapa Hills State Park Trail was dedicated at a ceremony on August 3, 1996. The trail continues to be upgraded for better visitor experiences. An overpass to carry the trail over a challenging crossing of State Route 6 at Littell was dedicated on June 23, 2023, and other projects will improve the trail surface and additional crossings.