Raymond, Washington

Raymond grew up almost overnight around a single resource: the vast stands of old-growth Douglas fir blanketing the Willapa Hills. The town was founded in nineteen oh three on the Willapa River in Pacific County, and within four years it had grown enough to incorporate. By nineteen twelve, Raymond's mills were cutting more than twenty-seven million board feet of lumber annually, and the shingle mills were turning out hundreds of millions of shingles a year, shipped by rail to the rest of the country and by ship to San Francisco, Hawaii, and South America.

Trains loaded with freshly cut logs ran day and night through the Willapa Hills. The population reached twenty-four hundred by nineteen ten and kept climbing. Then the old growth ran out.

The mills slowed and closed across the mid-twentieth century, and Raymond's population declined to a fraction of its peak. Today the town is known less for lumber than for its collection of wildlife and heritage sculptures displayed along the main streets, an unusual civic art project that gives the old mill town a second identity.