The Railroad Promises a New Line to Willapa Harbor
A Northern Pacific official says the Chehalis-to-South Bend line will be finished by July 1, opening timber and farm country to the coast.
Mr. Charles S. Fee, general passenger agent of the Northern Pacific road, St. Paul, was in the city yesterday. He said that his company was pushing tracklaying on the new line from Chehalis, Wash., a point forty miles south of Tacoma, to a point eighty miles beyond, with terminus at South Bend on the Willapa Harbor, a deep water harbor, and, in fact, the only one on the North Pacific coast having a channel with an average of twenty-two feet of water between the Columbia river and Puget Sound. This line will be completed by July 1. It will traverse a heavy timber country east and west of the Olympic mountains and a fine agricultural country in the valley of the Willapa river. Some of the farmers' government deeds here date back to 1838, the land being now worth $25 an acre.
“This line will be completed by July 1. It will traverse a heavy timber country east and west of the Olympic mountains and a fine agricultural country in the valley of the Willapa river.”
Railroad promotion in 1892 was a promise about land values, extraction and connection. The line helped remake southwestern Washington, and the tension between outside capital and local benefit is still recognizable.
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