Luther Ford's Prairie and the First Homestead at Forks

In January of eighteen seventy-eight, Luther and Esther Ford staked a claim on the flat prairie at the convergence of the Sol Duc, Bogachiel, and Calawah rivers, becoming the first permanent homesteaders in what would become Forks. The prairie was a natural clearing in an otherwise unbroken forest, and the forks of the rivers gave the settlement an obvious name.

Luther Ford established the first dairy in the area the following year, and other families began to arrive through the eighteen eighties, following trails that the settlers themselves cut through the forest to reach markets in Port Townsend and later Port Angeles on the northeastern coast of the peninsula. The nearest market was a journey of many hours through dense timber. Everything that moved in or out of the Quillayute Valley traveled on those trails.

A post office opened in eighteen eighty-four in the cabin of a local trapper named Ole Nelson. The postal authorities chose the name Forks for the river confluence nearby, and the name stayed.

For its first several decades, Forks was a remote farming community, its people raising dairy cattle and surviving on subsistence agriculture supplemented by hunting and fishing. The forest that pressed in on every side was not yet an industry but a presence, the thing that defined the edges of the cleared world and made the prairie feel like a pocket in a vast green silence. The timber economy that would come to define the town for most of the twentieth century was still a generation away.