Chehalis: How a Railroad Moved a County Seat

The town of Chehalis exists largely because one man persuaded a railroad to build through his land instead of someone else's.

In the early eighteen seventies, Lewis County's seat of government sat in a small settlement called Claquato, a few miles to the northwest. Claquato had been established in eighteen fifty-three by a settler named Lewis Hawkins Davis. It served the county's needs well enough, until the Northern Pacific Railroad began routing its line south from Puget Sound toward the Columbia River.

The railroad's surveyors were deciding which communities to serve and which to bypass. A man named William West understood what that decision would mean for Claquato, and what it could mean for a rival location. West negotiated with the Northern Pacific to run the line through a new townsite on lower ground closer to the river. When the railroad established its depot in eighteen seventy-three, the town that grew up around it first took the Saunders name, then was rechristened Chehalis around eighteen seventy in honor of the Chehalis people, the Indigenous inhabitants of this river valley.

The county commission followed the railroad, as county commissions typically do. On August first, eighteen seventy-four, the seat of Lewis County was formally transferred from Claquato to the new town. Claquato dwindled. A pioneer church built there in eighteen fifty-eight still stands as one of the oldest remaining structures in Washington state, a quiet monument to a community that lost its future to a rail line.

Chehalis grew into a regional hub for timber, agriculture, and commerce. The Chehalis people for whom the town is named were displaced from these same river bottoms through the treaty process of the eighteen fifties, their name preserved on the land while their communities were pressed onto a reservation miles to the west.