Armistice Day, Nineteen Nineteen: The Centralia Massacre
Washington
On November eleventh, nineteen nineteen, the first anniversary of the armistice that ended World War One, Centralia held a parade. Veterans marched down Tower Avenue in their Legion uniforms. And then something happened that the town has argued about ever since.
The Industrial Workers of the World, the radical labor union known as the Wobblies, had a hall on Tower Avenue. Relations between the Legion post and the IWW had been deteriorating for months. Lumber barons in Lewis County had been using Legion members as muscle against union organizing in the timber camps. The IWW feared the parade would end in an attack on their hall, and prepared to defend it.
Accounts of who fired first have never been fully resolved. What is clear is that when the marching column reached the hall, shots rang out, and four Legionnaires fell dead: Arthur McElfresh, Ben Casagranda, Warren Grimm, and Dale Hubbard, the nephew of a prominent lumber baron. The Wobblies said they fired in self-defense from windows and a nearby ridge. The Legion called it an ambush.
A young IWW member and veteran named Wesley Everest fled out the back and shot one of his pursuers before being captured at the bank of the Skookumchuck River. That night, a mob pulled Everest from the town jail, drove him to a bridge over the Chehalis River, and lynched him. His body was returned to the cell and left for other prisoners to see.
Seven IWW members went to prison for murder after a widely publicized trial. Not a single Legionnaire was charged in Everest's lynching.
The Centralia Massacre became a flashpoint in the broader Red Scare that swept the country in nineteen nineteen. Labor historians see it as a moment when organized capital, wartime nationalism, and racial terror converged to crush the Pacific Northwest's most radical union movement. Wesley Everest's grave, unmarked for decades, is now a registered historic site.
