Among the photographs collected so far are several showing the once-thriving logging industry in the town of Ryderwood. This one, taken in 1926, shows workers posing for a portrait near a train.
The logging camp days of Ryderwood are seen in this photograph from 1923. It will have been 100 years since this photograph was taken when the community celebrates its centennial in 2023.
From logging camp to retirement community, Ryderwood has never been a typical town.
In eight years, Ryderwood will be celebrating 100 years of its unique existence. Community members are already at work gathering information and conducting interviews about days gone by and the transformation the town has seen.
Ryderwood’s AMVETS Post 7010 is heading up the project, which will be coordinated with the Cowlitz County Historical Museum and Longview’s centennial, which is also in 2023.
Long-Bell Lumber Co. founded the community as a timber camp for loggers and their families in 1923. The company sold the town in 1953 to Senior Estates Inc., which transformed it into a retirement community.
Bill Greear, a current Ryderwood resident who also lived there when it was a logging camp, said AMVETS members decided to start the project now because it involves many people who “are actually quite old.”
“We’re working with a group who’s not going to be around here that much longer,” Greear said.
The somewhat morbid reality is evident in the dwindling number of people who attend Ryderwood’s annual Old Timers Picnic.
“We thought if we’re going to be able to collect as much of this as possible, then we need start soon,” he said.
Greear has already interviewed one of the Ryderwood’s oldest living former residents for the project — Vernetta Smith, for whom Chehalis’ library is named.
Smith, who now lives in Seattle, is the same age as the town. She moved there with her family when she was about 5 years old.
The interview was completed before an audience a few weeks ago when Smith was in the area with her family.
Greear is and Smith’s lives in Ryderwood when it was a logging town briefly overlapped as Greear was born in 1942 while Smith was living in the town. She moved to the Chehalis area with her family a few years later.
Smith’s father began working in the woods when he was 14 years old, she told Greear in the recorded interview.
“Logging was his life,” she said.
When her family heard about the logging camp in Ryderwood, they moved from Oregon in 1928.
“It was a lot different world than it is today, but it was a good world,” Smith told Greear.
During her time in Ryderwood, she attended and graduated from school, was involved in the church, enjoyed swimming in the nearby creeks and ponds and worked at the cafe and cleaning teachers’ rooms.
Near the end of her time in Ryderwood, she got married and had two of her children there before moving.
When her family first moved to Ryderwood, their home had no indoor plumbing. She said Ryderwood today is more “well-kept.”
“It was a hard life, but it was a good life — a lot of good people and a lot of nice times I remember with great love,” she said.
Greear lived in Ryderwood during the transition; he was 11 years old when Long-Bell sold the community. He was one of the only youngsters left at the time. His father was a logger when the town was sold, and he became the tree farm warden. Greear’s family was moved to the farm’s headquarters 1 mile north of Ryderwood.
When Greear was 18, he joined the U.S. Air Force and settled in Chehalis four years later. He moved back to Ryderwood in 2004.
Because he was young, Greear said, transition didn’t seem that significant.
“I never really gave it that much thought at the time because I was busy with school and delivering the papers and family and all that sort of thing. It just seemed normal,” he told The Chronicle. “But is was unique because it basically preserved the town.”
After information is gathered, Greear said, the group working on the project plans to put together a book or pictorial essay as well as a collection of the video recorded interviews to make available in town for access to residents and visitors.
He said various sources have said Ryderwood was the world’s largest logging operation and was one of the few camps where the loggers’ families also lived. It then became one of the first retirement communities, Greear said.
“The really special thing about this particular project is how unique Ryderwood really has been,” Greear said.
