HUNTERS AND FISHERMEN DELIGHTED IN THE WILD SURROUND

The superlatives for sale extended well beyond the town’s city limits. Longview was always a regional destination, interdependent marketing-wise with neighboring pioneers and pitchmen. The county, the region, the state all added their voices to Longview’s siren song:

This was clearly to be a model city, not a typical milltown, that Long hoped would attract a high-quality, family-minded class of worker. With a vision similar to that of the city planners, Oregon engineer Samuel D. Lancaster designed the new Columbia River Highway, a route that was to be beautiful as well as functional. When Oregon opened the first section to traffic in 1915, the highway’s spectacular engineering and aesthetic appeal attracted world attention. The first major paved highway in the Pacific Northwest also made automobile travel possible from Portland through the Columbia Gorge to eastern Oregon.

Carlos Schwantes

The Pacific Northwest

The development of transportation — such a challenge for the founders and early pioneers, especially given the forbidding rivers and demanding topography — would unlock much of Longview’s productivity and enhance its quality of life.

The Good Life

Longview’s story didn’t unfold with the precision and order assumed by the founders. Events changed that. The people who came to Longview didn’t fit their vision, either: neither the two thousand black mill workers nor the instant middle class eager and able to buy lots and build houses. Products of the times themselves, Longview’s people were hard-pressed, reeling, and poor. Economically the town achieved its initial goals only to have the markets slide from under it. The Depression and the war, which wreaked havoc on the region and the country at large, held a silver lining for Longview, with its industry, cheap energy, and deep water port. But a town and region so heavily reliant on extraction industries always faced a finite future. Nobody knew better than the Kansas City founders — who’d harvested almost entirely the timber resources of the south — that even the magnificent miles of cedar and fir would one day be exhausted. Longview would become the unlikely champion of recycling, product derivation, and forest management, almost despite itself. It could be argued that years before the term even fell into use, the residents of southwest Washington were environmentalists. Out of necessity.

Longview exists thanks to R.A. Long’s good faith and strength of character, not just his money. Its future is well served with those ideals intact, alive and flourishing.