Cedarvale

Cedarvale is a town of about 2,500 people in the Coast Range of the Commonwealth of Cascadia, on the Oregon side, in the upper valley of the Siletz River. It stands on a bench above Lake Cedarvale, a reservoir made in 1949 when a county public utility district dammed the river and flooded the valley floor below the town. The sea is about thirty miles west, and the Willamette Valley is about the same distance east over the range.

It was founded in 1906 around a shingle mill cutting western red cedar. It became a sawmill town, was incorporated in 1922, and for most of the twentieth century was owned in every sense that mattered by a single family company. The mill closed in 1993, after logging on the federal forests around it was cut back to protect old growth, and the town lost about two-fifths of its people over the following decade. What remains lives on commuting to the valley cities and the coast, on public employment, and on the lake in summer.

The town is ordinary, and this entry describes it as a representative example of the Coast Range mill town rather than as an exception. Three things about it are particular. It stands on ground that was part of the Coast Reservation until the 1890s. The dam that made its lake moved its cemetery and not all of the graves in it, and has no passage for fish, so the salmon run of the upper river ended in 1949. And the town’s high school, which the Commonwealth tried to close by merger in 2019, is still open, and its football team is the principal reason the town assembles.

Name

The town is named for the western red cedar the first mill cut. The tree grew in the wet bottom of the upper valley in stands large enough to support a shingle mill, and the company that built the mill in 1906 gave the settlement the name for its letterhead before there were more than a dozen houses.

The cedar that gave the name was mostly gone within thirty years. The mill turned to Douglas fir in the 1920s because the valley’s cedar was cut out, and the town has carried the name of a tree it no longer had the timber of for most of its existence. Nobody in Cedarvale regards this as ironic. Cedar still grows along the creeks and in the second growth, and the old people say, correctly, that the name describes the valley and not the stock.

The name has no connection with the Siletz language or with any earlier name for the place. The upper valley had names before 1906, in the languages of the peoples who lived along the river and of the bands moved there in the 1850s, and none of them was adopted by the settlement.

Residents are Cedarvale people in ordinary speech. The Courier has used “Cedarvalers” since before the war and nobody else does.

History

The river and the Coast Reservation

The Siletz River runs about seventy miles from the crest of the Coast Range to the sea, and its lower valley was the country of the Siletz people, the southernmost speakers of Tillamook, who fished it for salmon and lamprey and lived in plank houses along its lower reaches. The upper valley, where the town now stands, was used for hunting and gathering and was not permanently settled.

In 1855 the general government set aside a long strip of the coast and the Coast Range as the Coast Reservation, running more than a hundred miles from north to south and taking in the whole of the Siletz valley. A treaty was negotiated with the coast bands the same year to support it, and it was never signed for the Crown. The reservation rested on an executive order alone, and because it rested on an executive order, later statutes could reduce it without the consent of the people living on it.

In 1856, after the wars in the southern valleys, bands from across the Oregon side, from the Rogue River, the Umpqua, the southern coast and the Willamette Valley, were marched and shipped north to the reservation and settled at an agency on the Siletz. More than twenty peoples, speaking at least ten languages, were concentrated in a single valley that had supported one. Many died in the first years, of disease and of hunger when the promised supplies failed. The survivors and their descendants became the nation known since as the Confederated Tribes of Siletz.

The reservation was reduced twice by statute, in 1865 and 1875, each time to open land to settlers, and in the 1890s the remainder was allotted: individual holdings were assigned to tribal members and the rest of the land, declared surplus, was sold. The upper Siletz valley was surplus. It passed in the years around 1900 to settlers and to timber buyers, and the ground on which Cedarvale stands was among it.

The shingle mill, 1906 to the 1920s

The founding mill was built in 1906 by a family that had cut timber in the upper Midwest and came west for the cedar. The Upper Siletz Lumber Company, as it became, bought the valley bottom and the timber rights on the slopes above it, built a shingle mill beside the river, a boarding house and a company store, and laid a logging railway down the valley to meet the line to Yaquina Bay at Toledo.

The town was laid out on the bench above the mill because the valley floor flooded most winters. The company built the first houses, sold lots on the bench to its foremen and skilled men, and rented cottages to the rest. A post office opened in 1908, the first school in 1909, and the Cedarvale Courier in 1911, printed on a press the company lent and then sold to its editor.

By 1920 the town had about 1,800 people, a church of three denominations and two taverns the company disapproved of, and it applied to the county for incorporation. The valley’s cedar was by then nearly cut out, and in the early 1920s the mill was rebuilt as a sawmill for Douglas fir and hemlock from the slopes. The shingle trade ended in 1924.

Incorporation, 1922

Cedarvale was incorporated as a town in 1922, under a home-rule charter adopted at a public meeting and approved by the county court. The charter provided for a Mayor and a council, a town clerk and a water system, and the first council was, by the Courier’s count, five employees of the company and two of its tenants.

The company did not oppose incorporation, and there is no evidence it arranged it. It had no need to. It owned the mill, the store, the largest block of housing, the water rights on the creek that fed the town, and the only employment for thirty miles, and the town government it incorporated was a government of the company’s workforce, which for the next seventy years governed a town in which the principal question, whether the mill would run, was not the town’s to decide.

The dam, 1947 to 1949

In the 1940s the Lincoln County Public Utility District, formed by county vote to bring electricity to the coast towns the private utilities had declined to serve, looked for a site for a power dam and settled on the narrows of the upper Siletz, below the town. The district’s case was that the coast needed power, the river had a fall, and the valley above the narrows was thinly settled.

The valley above the narrows held about forty farms, the company’s log landing, the old wagon road, and the Valley Cemetery, where the town had buried its dead since 1907. The district acquired the farms by purchase, and where purchase failed by condemnation, between 1946 and 1948. It moved the cemetery in the summer of 1948.

The Upper Siletz Dam was closed in the autumn of 1949 and the lake filled over the following winter. It drowned about seven miles of valley floor. The mill, which had stood on the river, found itself on the shore of a reservoir, and the company made the reservoir its log pond: for the next forty years logs came down the slopes by truck, were dumped into the lake and rafted across it to the mill. The town called the lake the millpond until the mill closed, and a good many people still do.

The dam had no fish passage. It was not required to have one, and the district did not propose one. The salmon and steelhead that had run to the headwaters of the upper Siletz for as long as there had been salmon in the river ended at the foot of the dam in the spring of 1950.

The mill years, 1950 to 1990

The four decades after the dam were the town’s prosperous period, and the period its older residents mean when they speak of the town as it was. The mill ran two shifts, and in the 1960s three. The company rebuilt it in 1956, paid for the lights at the football field the same year, and built the grandstand that still stands there. The population passed 4,000 at the 1970 census and stayed there for a decade.

The work was dangerous. Men were killed in the woods by falling timber and in the mill by the machinery, and the town’s memorial, now on the mill site, carries sixty-one names from the years between 1906 and 1993. The mill was organised by the woodworkers’ union in 1937 after a strike the company lost, and the union and the company thereafter conducted the town’s real politics between them, in contract negotiations the council had no part in.

The company remained in the founding family for three generations, and it ran the town in the manner of a family firm: paternal, generous in bad years, and unwilling to discuss its intentions with anybody. It gave the land for the high school in 1953 and the park on the bench in 1961. It also decided, without consultation and without explanation, who worked in the mill and who lived in the company’s houses, and it used those decisions in ways the town has since had to state plainly (see Failings).

The closure, 1990 to 1993

The mill’s timber came mostly from the Siuslaw federal forest on the slopes around the valley, cut under federal sale. In 1990 the northern spotted owl, a bird of old-growth forest, was listed for protection under federal wildlife law, and in the following years the harvest on the federal forests of the Coast Range and the Cascades was cut back steeply, first by court injunction and then under the federal forest plan of 1994.

The company had seen it coming for a decade. It had cut its own land hard in the 1980s, and without the federal sales it did not have the timber to run the mill. It cut a shift in 1990, another in 1991, and announced the closure in the spring of 1993. The mill ran its last shift in August. About three hundred and forty people worked there when it closed.

The closure was accompanied by a bitter local argument, conducted in the Courier and at the diner for years afterwards, about whether the owl had closed the mill or the company had. Both were true in part. The federal harvest cut ended the timber the mill depended on, and the company had cut its own land to the point where it had nothing to fall back on. The argument was never settled, and it still divides families.

The company was wound up in 1996. It gave the mill site to the town in 1998, on condition that it be kept as a public park, and the town accepted it without a survey of the ground, which it has since regretted.

Since the mill

The town lost about 1,600 people between 1990 and 2000, mostly families of working age who went to the valley cities or out of Cascadia altogether. The 2000 census found about 2,400 people. The population has held near 2,500 since, sustained by three things that arrived in the same decade: commuters priced out of the valley who found the town cheap and the drive tolerable, public employment in the school and the federal forest, and summer residents on the lake.

The town’s recent history has been the ordinary history of a small place without an industry. It has argued about what to do with the mill site, and made it a park and boat launch. It has fought the Commonwealth to keep its high school, and won, for now. It has watched the lake shore fill with holiday houses, and has not yet decided what to do about them. It has kept the football team, and the team has mostly kept winning.

The lake and the dam

Lake Cedarvale is about seven miles long and at most three-quarters of a mile wide, lying along the flooded valley floor from the dam at the narrows below the town to the head of the reservoir near the old farm crossings. The Upper Siletz Dam is a concrete gravity dam about 140 feet high, owned and operated by the Lincoln County Public Utility District under a federal operating licence. It generates a modest amount of power, which the district sells to its customers on the coast, and it is now a small part of the Commonwealth’s grid, whose generation is dominated by the dams of the Columbia.

The cemetery

The Valley Cemetery was moved in the summer of 1948, and the removal has been disputed since. The district’s contractor, working from the cemetery’s register and the markers on the ground, exhumed 212 graves and reburied them in the new Bench Cemetery above the town, each under its original stone or a new marker where the stone was lost.

The cemetery’s register records more burials than were moved. The difference, on the most careful count, is about forty. Most were infants and children buried in the influenza years and in the hard winters before the first war, many of them under wooden markers that had rotted or been lost, and some were men killed in the woods who had no family in the valley and were buried by the company at its expense. The contractor’s report says that graves “not located on the ground” were left in place.

They are still there, under the lake. In the driest summers, when the district draws the reservoir down, the old cemetery’s boundary wall and some of the unmoved headstone bases appear on the shore near the head of the lake. The district has declined, since 1949, to draw the lake down on purpose to allow a search, on the ground that the power contract and the summer recreation season do not allow it, and has twice been asked by the town to reconsider.

The notice gave five weeks for applications and was posted in one place. Families who had moved away from the valley, and there were many, learned of the removal afterwards.

Fish passage

The dam has no passage for fish, and has had none since it was built. The salmon and steelhead run of the upper Siletz, which spawned in the tributaries above the narrows, ended when the dam closed, and the river above the lake has held only resident trout since.

The Confederated Tribes of Siletz have asked for a fishway, or for the dam’s removal, since the 1970s. The river is theirs by history, the fishery was the reason the coast bands lived on it, and the tribes hold that the Realm’s guarantee of their fishing, however incompletely kept, extends to a fishery that a public body destroyed. The district’s answer has been the same for fifty years: a fishway on a dam of that height would cost more than the dam has earned in its working life, and the district’s customers, who are the coast towns and not the tribes, would pay for it.

The question has become a legal one under the Commonwealth’s constitution, which requires a treaty impact review for significant decisions affecting treaty nations. The district holds that a review applies to new decisions and that the dam, which predates the constitution’s provision, is not one. The tribes hold that every renewal of the dam’s operating licence and every annual operating plan is a decision, and that each should have been reviewed. The Commonwealth’s courts have not ruled on it, and the licence does not expire until the 2040s.

The town’s position is uncomfortable, and it has never adopted one formally. The lake is the town’s summer economy and much of its identity. A fishway would not end the lake, but removal would, and most of the town’s residents regard the tribes’ case as just and their remedy as the end of Cedarvale. The council has passed two resolutions on the matter, in 1998 and 2016, both expressing support for “restoration of fish passage consistent with the continued existence of the reservoir”, and the tribes have described both as a way of saying no politely.

Government

The town corporation

Cedarvale is an incorporated town governed under its charter of 1922, amended several times and last in 2004. Under the Commonwealth’s local government law a municipal charter confers home-rule authority within the town’s limits, subject to Commonwealth statute, and the town exercises it over streets, water, planning, parks and the local rates, which is most of what a town of its size does.

It does not run the school, which belongs to a school district whose boundary takes in the surrounding hill country, and it does not police itself. It has no fire brigade of its own; the rural fire district covers the town from a station on Main Street staffed by volunteers and two paid officers.

The town employs eleven people, including the Town Manager, the clerk, a water and streets crew of five, and the part-time staff of the library.

The Mayor

The Mayor is elected at large for a four-year term, chairs the council and has one vote on it, and represents the town at the county and in dealings with the Commonwealth. The office is part-time and paid an attendance allowance.

Ruth Ellingsen has been Mayor since January 2025. She has taught history at Cedarvale High School for more than twenty-five years and continues to teach, and she came to public life as the organiser of the town’s campaign against the merger of the school in 2019 to 2021 (see Education). She was elected without party label, as all the town’s officers are, and is understood to have no party allegiance, which the town regards as correct in a Mayor and suspects in everybody else.

Her time in office has been taken up chiefly with the lake houses, on which she has proposed a local levy on houses left empty for most of the year, and with the fish passage question, on which she has said more in public than any of her predecessors and committed the town to nothing more than they did.

The Town Manager

The Town Manager is the town’s chief officer, appointed by the council, and runs its departments, prepares its budget and supervises its staff. The office was created by charter amendment in 1974, when the town’s affairs had grown too large for a part-time council and an elected clerk.

Marcus Delgado has held the office since 2021. He came to Cedarvale from the finance office of a valley county and is the first Town Manager not raised in the town. The manager of a town of 2,500 is also, in practice, its grant writer, its negotiator with the utility district and its chief engineer by default, and the office has in recent years spent more of its time on applications for Commonwealth and federal money than on anything else.

The Council

The Town Council has seven members, elected at large on staggered four-year terms, all of them part-time and none of them paid more than an attendance allowance. It meets on the first and third Tuesdays of the month in the council room of the town hall, a former bank on Main Street bought by the town in 1962.

The council’s business is small in scale and not in consequence to the people it concerns: the water rates, the streets, the mill-site park, the short-let rules on the lake shore and, recurrently, the fish passage resolutions. Attendance at its meetings is low, except when the lake houses are on the agenda, when the room overflows into the street.

Policing

The town has no police force of its own and has not had one since its last town marshal retired in 1971. It is policed by the Commonwealth Constabulary of Cascadia, which keeps a post in Cedarvale staffed by two constables and covers the town at other times from its station at the county seat. The arrangement is paid for from the Commonwealth’s budget and not the town’s, which is why the town has never seriously considered changing it.

The constabulary’s principal work in the town is traffic on the valley road, domestic calls and, in summer, the lake. Serious crime is rare, and the Courier reports every instance of it.

Representation

Cedarvale is in Lincoln County, and elects one of the county’s commissioners jointly with the upper valley. It sits in a Coast Range constituency of the Common House of the Legislature of Cascadia and in the coastal region of the Council of Regions.

In the federal House of Commons it is in the Willamette Valley constituency, which reaches over the range to take in part of the coast because the Oregon coast has no seat of its own (see Elections and Constituencies). The town is at the constituency’s far western edge, is outnumbered in it by the valley towns more than twenty to one, and does not expect its member to know where it is.

Politics

The town voted for the Labour and Social Democratic Party through the mill years, when the union was the largest organisation in it and the LSDP was the union’s party. It turned after the closure, and in the 1990s and 2000s voted for the Conservative and Crown Union, whose candidates promised to reopen the federal forests and did not. Since its founding in 2016 the Alternative for the Realm has taken a large share of the town’s vote, at some elections the largest, on a programme of opposition to Seattle and Portland that in Cedarvale needs no explaining.

The Greens are weak in the town and strong among the owners of the lake houses, most of whom are registered to vote in the valley cities and not in Cedarvale. That the people whose houses are changing the town cannot vote in it, and the people whose town is changing cannot vote where the houses’ owners live, is a fact the town’s politics returns to constantly.

Geography

The bench and the valley

The town stands on a river terrace about eighty feet above the old valley floor and now about sixty feet above the lake at full pool, on the north side of the upper Siletz. The bench is about a mile and a half long and half a mile wide, and the town fills most of it. Main Street runs along the bench from the valley road at its east end to the old mill road at its west, where it drops to the lake shore and the mill-site park.

South of the lake, and on every side of the bench, the slopes of the Coast Range rise to ridges of 2,000 to 3,000 feet. The slopes are forest, almost entirely second and third growth, planted after cutting, mostly Douglas fir with western hemlock and red alder, and red cedar along the creeks. Patches of older forest survive on the steepest ground and on the federal land above the valley, and it was over those that the closure of the mill was fought.

The woods and the trails

The woods above the town are a mixture of federal forest, land held by timber companies and small private holdings, and they are crossed by old logging roads and by the grade of the company’s logging railway, lifted in the 1960s. The railway grade, which runs along the north side of the lake and down the valley below the dam, is now the town’s principal trail, and the logging roads above it form a network of walks that the town uses heavily and the federal forest service maintains when it can.

The woods are fog-prone for much of the year, particularly in the mornings and in the valleys, and the fog is part of the town’s sense of itself. Hikers from the valley cities come for the fog as much as for the forest, which the town finds hard to understand.

Climate

The climate is mild, very wet and grey. The town receives about ninety inches of rain a year, most of it between October and April, and the winters are long runs of overcast and drizzle broken by storms off the Pacific. Snow falls most winters and rarely lies for long. The summers are dry, cool by the standards of the valley and often foggy in the mornings, and August is the one month the town can rely on.

The four seasons are distinct: a green, wet spring; a summer that the valley calls cool and the town calls warm; an autumn of rain and football; and a grey winter. The town measures the year by the rain gauge at the high school, whose readings the Courier has printed weekly since 1923.

Wildfire

The town holds that it is too wet for wildfire, and says so. The coast side of the range receives more rain than almost anywhere in Cascadia, the forest floor stays damp through most summers, and there has been no fire in the valley in living memory that came nearer the town than a ridge away.

The Commonwealth’s fire maps are less certain. They class the upper Siletz as moderate risk, higher than the town believes, on the ground that the great fires of the northern Coast Range in the 1930s burned country as wet as this, and that the summers have been drier since the 1990s. The town regards the maps as having been drawn in Olympia by people who have not stood in its rain, and the fire district’s two paid officers regard them as correct.

Economy

Commuters

The largest group of working residents commutes. The destinations are Corvallis, about an hour east over the range, for the university and the hospital; Salem, in the middle valley, at about an hour and a half; McMinnville and the northern valley; and Newport, on the coast, about fifty minutes west, for the port, the hospital and the county offices. A small number drive to Portland, two and a half hours each way, usually for part of the week.

The commuters came in the 1990s and 2000s because the town was cheap. Houses the mill families left behind sold for a fraction of valley prices, and the drive, though long, was on a good road through forest. That advantage has now largely gone, for reasons described under Housing.

Public employment

Public employment is the town’s second economy and its steadiest. The high school, its district office and the elementary school employ about a hundred people. The federal forest service keeps a ranger station at the east end of town, which manages the federal forest in the upper valley and employs about thirty people, more in the fire season. The county road department has a depot in the town, and the utility district employs a small crew at the dam.

The lake and the summer trade

The lake brings visitors from June to September: anglers for the trout, families for the swimming beach and the campground at the head of the lake, which the utility district runs, and boaters from the valley cities. The town’s summer businesses, a boat rental, two bait and tackle shops, a small motel, and the diner, depend on them, and the town’s water system and streets are built to a size that serves 2,500 people and struggle in August with more than twice that.

What remains of the timber trade

The timber trade did not end with the mill. The forests around the town are still cut, on private land and in smaller volumes on the federal land, and the logs go by truck to mills in the valley and at Toledo. A number of residents work as fallers, truck drivers and contractors, and a larger number work for forestry contractors in the planting, thinning and fire crews that the federal forest and the timber companies hire every year. Many of the planting crews since the 1990s have been Latino workers who came for the work and stayed.

Main Street

Main Street holds the town’s commercial life: a grocery, a hardware store, a pharmacy, the post office, two churches, a tavern, the town hall, the library, the fire station, the Courier’s office and the Millpond Diner, which opened in 1951 and has been the town’s principal public room since. The diner opens at five in the morning, which was once for the mill’s first shift and is now for the commuters and the forest crews. The town’s informal business is done there, including a good deal of the council’s, and a Mayor who did not eat breakfast in it would not be re-elected.

The street has lost about a third of its shops since the mill closed, and the empty fronts are a permanent subject of the council’s discussions and of the Courier’s editorials.

Transport

The town is reached by the valley road, a Commonwealth highway that runs up the Siletz from the coast at Newport and crosses the range to meet the valley road to Corvallis. It is the only paved road into the town. It closes, on average, two or three times a winter for slides or fallen trees, and the town is then reached by logging roads, if at all.

The logging railway was lifted in the 1960s, and there has been no rail service since. A county bus runs twice a day to Newport and once to Corvallis, and is used chiefly by pupils of the community college and by older residents going to the hospital. Most households have two vehicles, and a large share of the town’s income is spent on fuel.

The nearest airport with scheduled service is at Eugene, about two hours south. The lake has a boat launch at the mill-site park and a second at the campground.

Demographics and society

Population

The town has about 2,500 people. It reached its peak of about 4,100 in the 1970s, fell to about 2,400 by 2000, and has held near 2,500 since. The population is older than the Commonwealth average, and the share of residents over sixty-five has nearly doubled since the mill closed.

Most residents are white and descended from the mill families, or from the commuters who replaced them. About a tenth are Latino, most of them families of forestry workers who arrived after 1990. A smaller number are members of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz, whose government sits at the town of Siletz downriver and some of whose members have lived in Cedarvale since the mill years.

The Siletz

The town’s relationship with the Siletz is ordinary in daily life. Tribal members live in the town, their children attend the high school, and some play for the Timberwolves. The tribes’ fisheries office and the town’s water department cooperate on the creeks above the lake, and the tribes’ health clinic at Siletz is used by town residents who are not tribal members.

The relationship has two facts beneath it that the town has never fully acknowledged. The first is that the town stands on land that was part of the Coast Reservation until the 1890s, sold as surplus after allotment, and that the Siletz today hold a small fraction of what the reservation once was. The second is the dam. The fish passage question is the only point on which the town and the tribes are formally at odds, and it is conducted politely and without resolution.

Education

Cedarvale High School is the town’s high school and the only one in the upper valley. It has about 310 pupils, drawn from the town and from the hill country around it. The elementary school, next to it, has about 280.

In 2019 the Commonwealth’s education ministry proposed to merge the high school with the high school at Toledo, twenty miles down the valley, under a formula that treats secondary schools below a given enrolment as unviable. The proposal would have closed Cedarvale High and bussed its pupils down the valley road, which closes in winter.

The town fought it. The campaign, organised by a history teacher who is now Mayor, collected signatures from almost every adult in the town, filled the ministry’s public hearings with residents who had driven two hours to attend them, and argued that the valley road’s winter closures made a school at Toledo unreachable for a large part of the year. In 2021 the ministry withdrew the proposal. It did not change the formula. Enrolment has fallen by about twenty pupils since, and the town knows that the formula will produce the proposal again when the numbers cross the line, and that the second campaign will be harder than the first.

The school is the town’s largest employer, its only large public building other than the town hall, and the centre of its common life. The town understands that when it loses the school it will stop being a town and become a place where people live.

Religion

The town has three congregations: a Catholic parish, a Lutheran church founded by the Scandinavian families of the mill’s early years, and a community church formed in 1931 by the merger of the Methodists and the Presbyterians when neither could keep a minister alone. It had a fourth. The Church of America kept a parish here from 1911, the mill company having paid for the building, and closed it in 1997 when the congregation fell below a dozen. The church is now the town’s museum, and the diocese still owns the roof. Attendance at all three is lower than it was and older, in line with Cascadia’s general secularity, and the Lutheran church shares its pastor with a congregation in the valley.

Housing

The town’s most urgent social question is housing, and it is a question about the lake. Since the 2010s the lake shore and the streets overlooking it have been bought steadily by residents of the valley cities and of Portland as holiday houses, and by investors as short lets. About a quarter of the houses in the town are now empty for most of the year.

The effect has been to raise house prices beyond the reach of the town’s own young people, most of whom now leave when they finish school, as their grandparents’ generation left when the mill closed. The school’s enrolment, which the housing market is lowering, is the thing the town most needs to protect.

The council has limited short lets on the lake shore, which the owners have contested, and the Mayor has proposed a levy on houses left empty for more than nine months of the year, which the owners, who cannot vote in the town, have lobbied against in Olympia, where they can. The question is open. It is the principal subject of the town’s politics and of every council meeting at which the room overflows.

The press

The Cedarvale Courier has been published weekly since 1911, on Thursdays. It has an editor and two part-time staff, prints about 1,400 copies, and publishes online the same day. It covers the council in full, the school, the football, the rain gauge, the lake, the constabulary’s weekly log and every death in the upper valley, and it is the only newspaper in Lincoln County that still sends a reporter to the town’s council meetings. It has been threatened with closure by rising costs at intervals since the 1990s and has survived each time on local advertising and on subscriptions from former residents who left and still read it.

Culture

Friday football

The town’s principal civic gathering is the Friday night home game of the Cedarvale Timberwolves, the high school’s football team. The football the Realm plays in its schools is played under the conditions the Realm imposes on it, with independent safety certification, published costs and a non-contact team in the same school, and Cedarvale’s school keeps a flag team beside the tackle team as the conditions require.

Across much of the West the school game is a lesser occasion than it is in the South and the plains, and the newer western cities never took to it. Cedarvale is an exception. The home fixture draws more people to the field than live in the town, since the hill country comes in for it, and on a Friday in October the bench is empty of everyone but the old and the ill. The grandstand the mill built in 1956 still stands, the lights it paid for have been replaced twice, and the field is kept by volunteers.

The team plays in the smallest division of the eleven-a-side game, against the schools of the coast and the western valley, and it usually wins. It has won the Commonwealth’s small-schools title four times, most recently in 2017, and the banners hang in the gymnasium. The town takes the team’s record as a fact about itself: that a place that lost its industry, its fish and half its people can still beat the coast towns on a Friday night.

Homecoming

The civic year’s high point is Homecoming in October, the week of the season’s principal home game, when former pupils return to the town. The week has a parade on Main Street on the Friday afternoon, a bonfire on the mill-site park the night before the game, a breakfast at the diner on the Saturday for the returning classes, and the game itself.

Homecoming is the one week of the year when the town’s population is what it was in the mill years. The families who left after 1993 send their children and grandchildren back for it, and for many of them it is the only week they spend in the town. The town has understood for some years that Homecoming is now as much a gathering of the people who left as of the people who stayed.

The mill-site park

The mill site, given to the town in 1998, is now a park and the town’s boat launch, laid out on the flat ground at the lake shore where the mill stood. The foundations of the head rig and the burner’s footing are kept as features, and the town’s memorial to the sixty-one men killed in the woods and the mill stands at the park’s entrance.

The park is the town’s summer front room. Families swim from the beach at its east end, anglers launch from the ramp, and the Homecoming bonfire is built on the gravel at its centre. The town has put the history of the mill on boards around the park’s edge. They are accurate, and they do not mention the exclusion of the mill’s early years or the contamination of the ground under the grass.

The lake in summer

The summer life of the town is the lake: swimming, fishing, the dock at the park where teenagers spend the long August evenings, and the campground at the head of the lake, which fills with families from the valley. The lake is cold, being fed by mountain creeks, and the town’s children learn to swim in it anyway.

Failings

The land

The town stands on land that was part of the Coast Reservation, set aside in 1855 under a treaty that was never signed for the Crown, reduced by statute twice without the consent of the people living on it, and sold as surplus after allotment. The peoples concentrated on the reservation had been moved there by force, from homelands across the Oregon side, and many died in the first years. The upper valley passed to the timber buyers and the mill company in the years around 1900, and the town was built on it. None of this was unlawful at the time. The record of the Realm’s dealings with its treaty nations, of which the Coast Reservation is one part, will not bear examination, and the town’s title to its ground is part of that record.

The drowned valley

The families of the valley floor were paid too little and moved on short notice. The utility district acquired about forty farms in two years, by purchase where the families agreed and by condemnation where they did not, at valuations its own appraisers set and which the courts later found in two cases to be well below the land’s worth. Families who contested the valuations waited years for payment and, in most cases, received the district’s original figure. The cemetery notice was posted in one place for five weeks, families who had moved away were not written to, and about forty graves were left under the lake.

Exclusion in the mill years

The company did not hire Black workers, and it would not house Asian workers in the company’s cottages or sell them lots on the bench. The practice was not written down in any document the company published, and for that reason no statute or court ever reached it. It was enforced through the company’s hiring office, its control of the housing and the town’s custom, and it lasted from the founding until at least the 1950s. Chinese and Japanese labourers who worked on the logging railway in its first years lived in a camp on the valley floor and were gone by the 1920s. The town had no Black residents until the 1970s. The history boards in the mill-site park do not mention it.

The dead of the woods

Sixty-one men were killed in the woods and the mill between 1906 and 1993, most of them before the 1950s, when the company’s safety practices were those of the industry and the industry’s were bad. The memorial names them. The company paid the funerals, and in its first decades paid little else to the widows, who in many cases left the valley because the company’s houses went with the job.

The mill site

The mill site is contaminated. Decades of wood treatment, fuel storage and the burner left the ground and the lake bed at the old log pond carrying wood-preservative residues and the products of burning, and the bark and sunken logs of forty years of rafting lie on the lake bottom off the park. The town accepted the site in 1998 without a survey. When the contamination was found in 2003, the company had been wound up for seven years and there was nobody to recover the cost from.

The worst ground was capped before the park was laid out, and the town posts advice against swimming at the old log pond, at the park’s west end. A full clean-up of the lake bed has been estimated at several times the town’s annual budget, and the town, the utility district and the Commonwealth have argued since 2003 about who should pay for it. Nobody has.

Symbols

The seal

The seal of the Town of Cedarvale was adopted at incorporation in 1922. It is circular and shows a western red cedar standing on a riverbank, with a crosscut saw laid at its foot, within a border lettered Town of Cedarvale and Incorporated 1922. The seal is used on the town’s instruments, its letterhead and its vehicles.

The design is the company’s as much as the town’s. The cedar and the saw were the company’s trademark on its shingle bundles before they were the town’s, and the council of 1922, most of it the company’s employees, adopted them without discussion.

The flag

The flag of Cedarvale was adopted in 1972, for the town’s fiftieth year, from a design by pupils of the high school. It is forest green with a narrow wavy white band across its lower third, for the lake, and a red cedar in dark red-brown at the hoist. The flag flies at the town hall, the school and the mill-site park.

The lake on the flag was debated in 1972, when a number of residents whose families had farmed the valley floor asked that the town not put on its flag the water that covered their land. The council adopted the design unamended. The objection has not been raised since, and most of the town does not know it was ever made.

Assessment

Cedarvale is a representative place, and its interest is in how representative it is. Its history is the history of the Coast Range mill town: a valley taken from its first people and sold, a family company that built and owned the town, a public dam that drowned the valley floor and the salmon run for the coast’s electricity, forty good years, and a closure that came from a federal decision the town had no part in and a company decision it was never told about. Every stage of it happened to many towns in Cascadia, and to many towns in the forests of the West.

What the town did afterwards is also representative, and more to its credit. It kept its school against the Commonwealth, kept its newspaper against the costs, kept its team, turned the mill site into a park, and held its population steady when it could have halved again. It did those things with a government of eleven employees and a part-time council, and without an industry.

The failings are as ordinary as the rest. The town’s title to its ground came out of the dispossession of the Siletz. Its lake drowned forty graves nobody searched for and a fishery that the Siletz had lived on. Its mill kept out Black and Asian workers without ever writing it down. It accepted a contaminated site without looking. None of these was unusual in a town of its kind, and none is unusual in being left unmentioned on the boards in the park.

The two open questions in the town, the lake houses and the dam, are both questions about who the lake belongs to. The houses are bought by people who use the lake and do not vote in the town. The dam is maintained by a district that serves the coast and not the town, against a nation whose river it was. The town depends on the lake more than on anything else it has, and has the least say over it of any of the parties.

Chronology

See also

• Commonwealth of Cascadia
• Daily Life in Cascadia
• Daily Life: Indigenous Nations
• Football
• Elections and Constituencies
• Alternative for the Realm
• Labour and Social Democratic Party
• Ahwatukee
• The Royal American Parks System

Trivia

Categories

Land & Nature · Commonwealth of Cascadia · Towns & Settlements · Timber · Treaty Nations · Pacific Northwest