Kalama: Where Rail Meets Sail

The slogan painted on early Kalama promotional materials read: Where Rail Meets Sail. It was not an exaggeration. For a brief, electric moment in the eighteen seventies, this small Columbia River town was the hinge point of the entire Pacific Northwest transportation network.

In early eighteen seventy, General John Sprague of the Northern Pacific Railway scouted the Columbia's north bank looking for a place to anchor the western end of the railroad's transcontinental ambitions. Engineers needed a site deep enough for river steamboats, far enough downriver to avoid winter ice, and close enough to Portland to matter. They settled on a spot near the mouth of the Kalama River, which, by one well-known account, took its name from a Hawaiian man named John Kalama who had worked the Columbia fur trade, though historians also cite a Native word as a possible source. The Northern Pacific purchased seven hundred acres, platted a town in January eighteen seventy-one, and began construction.

Within months, three thousand five hundred workers had descended on this stretch of riverbank. Kalama was incorporated by the territorial legislature the same year and made the seat of Cowlitz County in eighteen seventy-two. The population surged, saloons appeared, and the town briefly held more economic energy than any community between Portland and Puget Sound.

From eighteen seventy-four to eighteen eighty-four, the arrangement worked like this: passengers and freight arrived in Tacoma by rail, transferred to Columbia River steamboats at Kalama, and floated upstream to Portland. Then a massive ferry, the second largest car float in the world at the time, began carrying entire rail cars across the Columbia, eliminating the transfer. When the Northern Pacific finally completed a fixed railroad bridge at Vancouver in nineteen oh eight, Kalama lost its critical role almost overnight.

The county seat moved to Kelso in nineteen twenty-two. Today Kalama is a quiet river town, its grain elevators and industrial port the only remaining echoes of the moment when this bend in the Columbia controlled the gateway to the Pacific Northwest.