South Bend (Washington)

South Bend is a place in Pacific County in the US state of Washington . It is the administrative center of the county and had exactly 1,807 inhabitants in the 2000 census. The town lies at the mouth of Willapa River in the Willapa Bay and describes himself as Oyster Capital of the World ( " oyster capital of the world").

history

The Pacific County Museum, maintained by the Pacific County Historical Society . It publishes the Sou'wester , which appears quarterly.

Early history

The lower Willapa River shows early signs of settlement. In historical times, the Willapa Chinooks (also Shoalwater Chinooks) settled here in several villages on the river, one of which stood where South Bend is today. After Edward Curtis it was called Tshélso, which means 'small, sandy place'.

A short portage separated Willapa Bay from the larger Chinook villages on the Columbia River. In addition, there were Lower Chehalis from the north, who were closely related to the Chinook.

Chinook and Lower Chehalis worked with white Americans to catch oysters . They sold their catch in San Francisco . The governor of the territory Isaac Stevens negotiated in February 1855 with Quinault , Queet , Lower Chehalis, Upper Chehalis, Shoalwater Bay , Chinook and Cowlitz at the so-called Chehalis River Treaty Council (now Cosmopolis). However, they refused to move to a reservation .

reserve

Although there was no contract of assignment of their territories as a result, settlers pushed to the Willapa River. In order to secure land for the Indians, on September 22, 1866, President Andrew Johnson initiated the establishment of a reservation, namely the Shoalwater Bay Tribes Reservation . However, it comprised only 335 acres near Tokeland for the Lower Chehalis and the Willapa Chinook, who lived on Willapa Bay. However, many of them did not move into the reserve, but continued to follow their annual cycle migration.

White settlers

The first white settler in South Bend arrived virtually immediately after the reservation was established. The Lower Chinook and Lower Chehalis stayed on Willapa Bay, some moved to the Shoalwater Bay Tribes Indian Reservation near Tokeland, but most preferred not to live on the reservation.

With the corresponding laws behind them, more and more settlers occupied the land (Donation Land Act and Homestead Act). In addition to agriculture and livestock farming, the quick profit from logging in the temperate rainforest attracted visitors. Giant arborvitae , Douglas firs and West American hemlocks still covered around 90% of the country. In the 1870s, the inhabitants mostly referred to themselves as farmers or oyster men. There were also employment opportunities at the John and Valentine S. Riddell Mill, which was built in 1868 on the site of what is now Helen Davis Park.

The first school opened on Nob Hill, west of the mill, in 1875, as did the first post office. The place got its name after a large knee or a bend in the Willapa River.

Steam boats, industrialization, rail connections

In 1875 the first steamboat started operating on Willapa Bay. From 1889 you could drive to Ilwaco with the Ilwaco Railroad and Steam Navigation Company .

Salmon was first processed industrially in 1881, and in 1887 the Reeves brothers opened a cannery on the north bank of the river, more precisely at The Narrows, at the upper end of the eponymous river knee.

In 1889, investors founded the South Bend Land Company . They acquired around 2000 acres of land. They pledged part of the land to the Northern Pacific Railway in exchange for guarantees that South Bend would be connected to the Tacoma - Portland line. On April 1, 1890, land was sold for $ 70,000 in a single day. Between 1889 and 1894 the population grew from 150 to 3,500.

City elevation, canal construction, highway connection

The city was incorporated on September 9, 1890, and George U. Holcomb of the South Bend Land Company became the first mayor . In 1893 there was a shortened connection to the railway network, but the seat of the county was still in Oysterville on the Long Beach Peninsula. Although the decision was made in favor of South Bend, Oysterville refused to hand out files and seals. As a result, two boats full of men drove into town and forcibly took them away.

Despite these successes, land prices began to fall, as did the tax estimate, which fell from 2.5 million in 1891 to 1.7 million the following year. The panic of 1893 put the economy to a standstill; in 1895 the estimate was only $ 414,320. Symptomatic is the Hotel Willapa, the 400-room hotel recently built by the Northern Land Band Development Company . It never opened and had to be demolished in 1919.

The Army Corps of Engineers dug a canal from Willapa Bay to Willapa City above South Bend. Ships could now take passengers and goods with them on a larger scale. This increased the logging in particular. In particular, the reconstruction of San Francisco after the earthquake of 1906 led to widespread deforestation. South Bend still had 3,000 residents. The fishing for crabs reached considerable proportions. In 1912, however, the timber industry dominated, with a daily output of one million shingles per day. 1910-11 a new courthouse was built. This Pacific County Courthouse is listed on the National Register of Historic Places .

However, the land of the railroad posed a hurdle, because no new industries could settle in this way. In 1928 the Port of Willapa Harbor was created between Raymond and South Bend. This also promoted the removal of large tree trunks. In 1930 Highway 101 was opened, connecting Aberdeen and Raymond-South Bend in this section. Thus South Bend also got access to the ferries over the Columbia River to Astoria.

Great Depression

At the end of 1929, after the stock market crash, the sawmills suddenly stopped working - the first did not reopen until the summer of 1933. Only county, school, and oyster catching were left to work. In the absence of money, the South Bend Merchants' Association printed its own money, which Raymond's Commercial Club had dared to do a year earlier . The so-called wooden money could be exchanged for the state vouchers. In February 1934 the South Bend Merchants' Association brought out money again, this time on paper. However, once it got wet it dissolved quickly and it was very brittle.

End of logging, tourism

In 1931 the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company bought several sawmills. They worked so efficiently that the end of the forests was foreseeable as early as the 1950s. The last sawmill in South Bend closed in 1953, making the oyster industry the town's last industry. The import of Atlantic oysters was a failure, followed by Japanese ( Crassostrea gigas ), which during the war were no longer called Japanese, but Pacific oysters. The first of these had already been introduced in the 1920s. The fact that Willapa Bay, in contrast to most American bays on the Pacific coast, offered extremely clean water contributed significantly to this. This fact and the remaining forests, together with a rich bird population, increasingly attracted tourists to the region. The Birding Trail of Southwest Washington , maintained by the Audubon Society , takes you to Helen Davis Park. In addition, the track bed of the Northern Pacific was renatured and now forms the Willapa Hills Trail .

sons and daughters of the town

Milt Kleeb (1919–2015), jazz musician, arranger and composer

Web links

46.662546 -123.806999Coordinates: 46 ° 40 ′ N , 123 ° 48 ′ W