Bridal Veil: Company Town in the Gorge

The community of Bridal Veil was born in eighteen eighty-six when the Bridal Veil Falls Lumbering Company pushed a sawmill up Larch Mountain, just above the Columbia River. Workers and their families moved in, and for half a century the town hummed. In nineteen thirty-seven new owners converted the mill to making wooden cheese boxes for Kraft Foods, which kept the lights on until nineteen sixty.

The Trust for Public Land acquired the site in nineteen ninety, but after years of debate the historic mill houses were demolished in two thousand one. Today almost nothing physical remains, though a small post office still technically makes it a named place. The falls above town, dropping in two tiers off a basalt ledge, outlasted everything else.