A Town Determined to Stay on the Map
Cusick lays fresh sidewalks to the depot, grades its muddy streets, breaks ground on a drainage dike, and chases a long-idle sawmill back to life.
Cusick is still on the map and growing all the time, in spite of the efforts that have been made to wipe it off the face of the earth.
The city fathers got busy a short time ago and laid a lot of new sidewalk, the principal part of it extending to the depot, and last week they had the streets graded, so there is no more walking in mud.
Mr. Remly was in town the first of the week negotiating with J. W. Cusick for the sawmill site at this place. Mr. Remly contemplates starting the sawmill that has stood idle so long, and we certainly hope to see something done with it soon.
Jones Onesrud are on the ground to begin work on the dike in diking district No. 1 near Cusick. This dike will be a great help to the farmers near Cusick and that will mean a great deal to our town also.
The I. W. N. brought several train loads of gravel Monday and filled in around the depot and freight house.
The lines have been surveyed ready for digging the ditches for the water mains of the town water works, and the piping is all on the ground ready as soon as the work can be done.
“Cusick is still on the map and growing all the time, in spite of the efforts that have been made to wipe it off the face of the earth.”
Cusick's struggle in 1910 — a timber-and-farm town scraping together sidewalks, a drainage dike, and a water system to prove it deserved to survive — is the same fight rural Washington towns wage today. When the mills close and young people leave, the difference between a town that endures and one that vanishes is often exactly this: whether anyone bothers to pour concrete and dig ditches. The optimism of a mill that 'might run again' is the perennial bet of resource towns on their next boom.
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