Leavenworth: The Bavarian Town That Saved Itself

Halfway between Seattle and Spokane, where the Wenatchee River cuts through the eastern wall of the Cascades, there is a town that looks like a village from the Bavarian Alps. The buildings have painted murals and carved wooden trim. The shop signs use Germanic lettering.

Accordion music drifts from the restaurants. The architecture suggests, quite deliberately, a small mountain town somewhere in southern Germany. The town's name is Leavenworth, and none of this happened by accident.

Leavenworth's Bavarian identity was a deliberate act of civic survival, chosen by a dying railroad town in the nineteen sixties that had tried almost everything else. The Wenatchee River valley had been home to the Wenatchi people for thousands of years before the Great Northern Railroad arrived in the eighteen nineties. The railroad needed a route through the Cascades, and this valley provided one, threading west through the canyon toward Stevens Pass.

Leavenworth became a division headquarters, a roundhouse town, with hotels and saloons and shops built on railroad wages. The town grew to a population estimated as high as five thousand during the boom years. Then, in the nineteen twenties, the Great Northern moved its division headquarters to Wenatchee and rerouted its tracks to bypass Leavenworth.

The departure slowly hollowed the town out. By the late nineteen fifties, businesses were closing, young people were leaving, and the Chamber of Commerce had run out of ideas. In nineteen sixty-two, community members and economists from the University of Washington formed a group called Project LIFE, short for Leavenworth Improvement For Everyone, to find a path forward.

Two Seattle businessmen, Ted Price and Bob Rodgers, proposed transforming the entire downtown into a Bavarian alpine village, matching the forested slopes and snowy peaks above the valley to an architectural tradition from across the world. The first building converted in the summer of nineteen sixty-five, a fire-damaged hotel rebuilt as the Edelweiss. Tourists responded.

By nineteen seventy, a design review board had authority to enforce the Bavarian standard on all construction downtown. Today Leavenworth draws more than three million visitors a year. The railroad town that was fading away became one of the most visited destinations in the Pacific Northwest.