The Long Decline: From Five Thousand to Nearly Empty
Near Leavenworth, Washington
By the nineteen fifties, Leavenworth was a town in visible trouble. The railroad had taken its headquarters to Wenatchee a generation earlier. The timber industry that had once filled the valley with mill workers was contracting.
Main Street had empty storefronts. Young people were leaving for Spokane or Seattle, and the ones who stayed had fewer jobs available with each passing year. The Chamber of Commerce tried various approaches: promoting the salmon hatchery on Icicle Creek, selling the outdoor recreation angle, running heritage programs.
None of it generated enough activity to reverse the decline. The population had fallen from nearly two thousand in the Great Northern years to somewhere around a thousand by the late nineteen fifties. A community group forming in nineteen sixty-two, calling themselves Project LIFE, stood for Leavenworth Improvement For Everyone.
Working with economists and urban planners from the University of Washington, they began studying what a small mountain town with no unique natural resource and no railroad could offer to the outside world. The answer they arrived at, after genuine deliberation, was the landscape itself: a river canyon, forested slopes, and a backdrop of snowy peaks that looked, to certain eyes, something like the Alps. That observation was the seed of everything that followed.
