Leavenworth: The Invention of a Bavarian Village

Leavenworth, Washington has an origin story that sounds impossible: a dying American railroad town in the Cascades deliberately reinvented itself as a Bavarian village and it worked. But the story behind the transformation is more desperate and more interesting than the lederhosen and gingerbread storefronts suggest.

The Great Northern Railway built through the Wenatchee Valley in the eighteen nineties, and Leavenworth grew up around a division point where trains were serviced and crews changed. Sawmills arrived. The Blewett and other mining operations sent ore through. At its peak, Leavenworth was a genuine hub of extraction and transport in the Cascades. Then, in nineteen twenty-five, the Great Northern relocated its division point thirty miles east to Wenatchee. In nineteen twenty-nine, to avoid the difficult grades of Tumwater Canyon, the railroad bored the new Cascade Tunnel and routed trains through Chumstick Canyon instead, bypassing Leavenworth almost entirely. The two industries that had built the town vanished within a decade of each other.

By the early nineteen sixties, Leavenworth had empty storefronts and a shrinking population. That is when two Seattle businessmen, Ted Price and Bob Rodgers, who had bought a failing cafe along Highway Two in nineteen sixty, began suggesting something radical. The town sat in a valley that looked, they argued, remarkably like the Bavarian Alps. What if the buildings looked like it, too?

The idea went nowhere until the Leavenworth Women's Club organized a planning effort called Project LIFE, which stood for Leavenworth Improvement for Everyone. They won a ten-thousand-dollar prize from the Sears Roebuck Foundation in nineteen sixty-four. A trip was organized to visit Solvang, California, a Danish-themed town that had saved itself with a similar gamble. Architects came on board. German-born designer Heinz Ulbricht helped shape the aesthetic. On July first, nineteen sixty-five, the first renovated building, the Edelweiss Hotel, opened with a new half-timbered Bavarian facade.

Building by building, the downtown was reimagined. Zoning locked in the theme so later owners could not deviate. Within a few years, the tourists began arriving. Today more than a million people a year visit Leavenworth, which sustains its economy almost entirely on the idea that Price and Rodgers proposed and the Women's Club brought to life: that a mountain town could reinvent itself by deciding, collectively, to look like somewhere else.