As Toledo considers reinventing itself, I’d like to see the town tap into its rich history as home to the friendly Cowlitz tribe and the first white settlement north of Vancouver.
Washington State University’s Rural Communities Design Initiative will help residents envision what Toledo will look like in 10 or 20 years and lay the groundwork for grants. Under the program for rural communities, professors supervise design and construction students as they put into practice their classroom learning.
“Our little town here has reinvented itself many times — from a little settlement, then the riverboat, then the highway,” said Mike Morgan, a Vision Toledo organizer. “It’s high time to reinvent ourselves again.”
At a public meeting at 6:30 p.m. Thursday at Toledo Middle School, WSU professors will discuss their program and then citizens will break into small brainstorming groups.
I believe Toledo’s role in Washington state history makes it unique.
Generations of Cowlitz Indians created countless trails through the woods and along the prairies as they fished, hunted, picked wild blackberries and huckleberries, and sought huge trees for crafting canoes and flat-bottom bateaux.
In late 1818, Simon Bonaparte Plamondon, an 18-year-old employee of the Northwest Fur Co., paddled a canoe up the Cowlitz River and landed near Toledo, where he discovered beautiful land with good fishing, trapping, hunting and an open prairie prime for plowing. He married a daughter of the Cowlitz Chief Scanewa and saw his first child born here in 1821.
In 1838, the Hudson’s Bay Co. established the Cowlitz Farm on about 4,000 acres and encouraged retirees and former employees to settle nearby and work there.
The following year, at the urging of Plamondon, Father Francis Norbert Blanchet and Father Modeste Demers established the state’s first Catholic Church — and the mother church of the Seattle diocese —on the Cowlitz Prairie. Blanchet later served as the first archbishop of Oregon, and Demers was first bishop of Vancouver Island.
Only a handful of white families loyal to the company lived north of the Columbia River and Fort Vancouver, most in the Toledo area. One was George Roberts, who took over as head of the Cowlitz Farm in 1846 and kept a detailed diary. His wife, the first white woman to live at Fort Vancouver, was also the first to die in Western Washington after a typhoid epidemic.
With the opening of the Oregon Trail in 1843, immigration began in earnest. John R. Jackson settled north of Cowlitz Farm in 1844 and built the first courthouse, which still stands today. That same year brought George Waunch, who settled near what today is Centralia.
Settlers traveled up the Columbia and Cowlitz rivers, disembarked at Cowlitz Landing and traveled north along the Cowlitz Trail offshoot of the Oregon Trail. Wagon wheel tracks are still visible inside the Lewis and Clark State Park.
Edward D. Warbass filed a donation land claim in 1850 for a town near Cowlitz Landing called Warbassport, which had a store, hotel, and, in 1854, the Cowlitz post office.
The river played a huge role in 1879, when the paddle-wheel steamer Toledo began plying its waters.
“It would be really neat to get funding for a riverboat,” Morgan said, noting it could be erected on dry land, perhaps at the county park.
Leavenworth has its Bavarian theme, and Cashmere promotes a pioneer village, but that town dates back only to the 1863 arrival of a Catholic missionary. Its first white settler (a German immigrant) arrived in 1881.
Eatonville has a Pioneer Farm Museum and Ohop Indian Village on a homestead established in 1887.
Toledo’s history goes back much further than those communities. Why not capitalize on it?
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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at memoirs@chaptersoflife.com.
