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| Volume XXXVII Special Edition, 2002 |
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| Stella & L. V. Raymond
Founders of Raymond, Washington |
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| Volume XXXVII Special Edition, 2002 |
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| Stella & L. V. Raymond
Founders of Raymond, Washington |
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| The
Sou'wester |
| ISSN #0038-4984
Copyright, 2002, by the Pacific County Historical Society. No portion of this publication may be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the Society's Editorial Board. The Sou'wester is a quarterly publication of the Pacific
County Historical Society and Museum. The Pacific County Historical
Society is a non-profit 501(C)(3) organization in South Bend, Washington.
In addition to the Sou'wester, the Society publishes a quarterly newsletter for its members and operates the Pacific County Historical Society Museum in South Bend, Washington.
Design, photo scans, and page layout by Charles B. Summers,
South Bend, Washington.
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| The
Sou'wester Special Edition, 2002
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By Med Nicholson 2 |
By Lora Krapohl Nicholson |
| Acknowledgements
Who were the Raymonds? As rank newcomers to the city in 1987 we found that not a great deal was generally known about the couple whose name the city took. They had been gone almost half a century and there was that plaque on Fifth Street identifying them as founders of the city. They had lived in a rambling frame house on the prow of the Island ... but what had they done to deserve the honor of founders? What kind of lives had they lived? We bought a house across the street from the Raymond property, and impulsively added their famed water tower itself. It was a great place to walk our golden retriever and, for a few years, to play catch with our son. Cutting the grass was good exercise, too, and we began to feel closer to the city’s history, looking, sometimes with trepidation, at our mini-cooling tower across the street. We got to know neighbor Lillian Weir and learned she had been a close friend of Stella and Leslie Raymond. Reporter Theresa Willeford-Hathaway did a beautiful piece about Lillian in the Herald, and we soon realized Lillian would make a wonderful interview for a story about the Raymonds themselves. She had known Leslie and Stella quite well. Then Lillian died and we delayed (but didn’t forget) the project for a few years. Just before we sold the paper we put Theresa on the story, which was still in process when our sale of the Herald went through in May, 1996. Notes for Theresa’s story found their way to Bruce Weilepp at the Pacific County Historical Society, where they gestated until last year, when Bruce asked Lora and me to put together a comprehensive account of the Raymonds’ lives. As soon as we began our research we realized that Mayor A. C. Little was necessarily intertwined with the Raymonds, significantly expanding the fascinating assignment. The heart of our pieces on the Raymonds that follow are Stella’s diaries for 1906 to 1916, and her journal of the trip around the world in 1924 and 1925. Why she interrupted her entries in 1916, we have no idea, but she may have realized that the city, an exciting, vital place to live and work, had reached its zenith. Ahead lay consolidation, departure of the timber kings, belt tightening, and probably most importantly, a shift in business dominance from independent lumber manufacturing to retailing. Nor do we have any idea why she restarted her diary in 1939 and continued it until August 1960, just four months before her death at age 85. But that’s a story for other journalists. Leslie Raymond left behind virtually no letters, but he was a skilled, enthusiastic photographer who set up his own darkroom and undoubtedly printed many of the photos with these articles himself. Thus, our acknowledgements should begin with our subjects themselves. Leslie and Stella’s niece, Thayer Raymond, was also an accomplished photographer who did us the enormous favor of identifying the subjects of her pictures. The remarkably complete files of the Pacific County Historical Society, maintained through the years by Director Weilepp and his predecessors were vital to our research, and so too, were the bound volumes of the South Bend Journal, Willapa Harbor Pilot, and Raymond Advertiser. We could make very little use of the Raymond Herald because most copies for the years 1907-1912 have long been missing. Maybe they’ll eventually turn up in an attic somewhere and be available for future researchers. There are so many others to thank. Bruce Walker of Pacific County Title Company did us an enormous favor by not only opening his record books to show the significant Island land transfers at the turn of the last century, but drawing a map of them for us, that we could better explain them. Arline Robinson of Willapa deserves our particular thanks for preserving the Paulding and Raymond scrapbooks and photos and allowing us to use them. Barbara Goodin of Raymond offered thoroughly delightful recollections of the city as well as the Raymonds at mid-century. Contractor Dave Wolfenbarger told wry stories of doing business with L. V.. A noontime cup of coffee with Al Karlis led to a chat with Del Brown and his tale of L. V.’s rejoinder to brother Zack. |
| Ken Grimm remembered L. V.’s
generosity of fifty years earlier, and Irene and Everett Blake the Raymonds’
down-to-earth neighborliness. As did several others we talked with,
the late Claude House, Jr., recalled L. V. as tight with a buck, but he
didn’t seem to regard the trait as a character flaw.
Ray Meredith joined us in Olympia twice for Sunday brunch to trace his family’s ties with Leslie and Stella and his own remarkable career. Ron Brummel and Karen Clements helped us assemble data on the Raymond Foundation’s vital support of charitable causes. Greta Hitz of Los Angeles, daughter of a California friend, took the photo and dug out the curious story of A. C. Little’s home in Van Nuys. Our son, Joseph Nicholson of Seattle, and Med’s sister Genie Fox of Aberdeeen completed valuable research on Little’s marital career, though gaps remain in our coverage of this subject. Jean Shaudys, with the help of Pacific County Clerk Virginia Leach and her staff, provided a record of the lawsuits A. C. Little faced in South Bend, and Jean also took us through ‘who’s who’ of the local legal profession. Sue Maloney helped us establish the important relationship between Stella Raymond and her namesake, Stella Jacobsen. Thanks everyone for your help. Getting to know Leslie and Stella has been a wonderful experience. Med Nicholson Casa Grande, AZ March 15, 2002 Financial Support Financial support for this expanded issue comes from the Stella and Leslie Raymond Foundation, Harbor Community Bank, and the Willapa Heritage Foundation. |
| Introduction
This issue of the Sou’wester is special for a number of reasons. As the reader has already discovered by picking the issue up, this is large publication, which we will count as an all in one 2002 Sou’wester. Two years in the making, the Stella and Leslie Raymond story is a remarkable achievement by the writing team of Lora and Med Nicholson. Their first effort for us, the Ben Cheney story, was one of our most popular recent issues. This time the Nicholsons have truly poured their heart and soul into one of the more significant, but little known Pacific County stories. I admire the Nicholsons for tackling this project, and hope our readers will share my respect for the quality of what they have prepared. I must admit that when I pitched this project to the Nicholsons I was aware of a resonance between the Raymonds and their biographers. Both couples shared a close business as well as personal relationship. Although I knew about their previous interest in the Raymonds and early City of Raymond history I doubt they fully appreciated how much work would be involved. |
Lora and Med Nicholson. |
| Lora’s transcription of Stella’s diaries
alone is worthy of an advanced scholarly degree. Sadly this would
prove to be Lora’s last project, as she passed away shortly after finishing
her portion of the story. I very much missed her capable assistance
in doing the final preparation work for publication.
Besides the Nicholsons, credits for this issue should also go to all the folks that saved Raymond family materials over the years, and made them available for historical study. These include; Thayer Raymond, Hulda May Giesy, Ruth Dixon, the Nupp family, Arline Robinson, Betty Miller, Ralph Anttila, and Thoreau Raymond. The City of Raymond Engineer’s office made early records available to the authors. Credit should also go to The loyal Thursday museum cataloging crew of Doris Patton, Jan Green, and Carrie Seaton who organized much of the Raymond materials, making them accessible for research. Our readers may be interested that we are planning another story focusing more on the geographic, real estate, and business history of Raymond. I don’t know how soon this history will be ready for publication, but I just wanted to let you know more is coming. The earlier development of South Bend also deserves similar treatment, but I am informed by experts that such a history would be considerably more complex than Raymond due to the larger number of players involved. Bruce Weilepp, Editor |
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Leslie Vosberg Raymond and Stella Johnson at the time of their marriage in 1897. PCHS #7-31-70-1 (39) |
Raymond: Empire City of Willapa Harbor
Where did Leslie and Stella Raymond get the wild idea that they could build a town; and a fortune; from the watery 310 acre plot at the mouth of the South Fork her mother turned over to them? Was it from her indominatable mother, Lucy Roney, who would remain close to Leslie and Stella the rest of her life and repeatedly provide both moral and financial support? Was it from Alexander C. Little, the volatile, charismatic promoter who arrived in town at the turn of the century; as did the Raymonds; and was its dominant political force for more than a decade? Or was it an idea that Leslie, an unexciting but fiercely energetic manager, held to himself through the years, disclosing his plans only as necessary, avoiding the limelight, paying his dues, never threatening other members of the power structure? It was an unlikely place for a new city, but Willapa Harbor was the heart of a huge stand of cedar, fir, hemlock and spruce; thirty billion board |
| feet, according to the Raymond Commercial
Club in 1912. Almost a century later, a touring Weyerhaeuser officer,
perhaps trying to buck up Willapa business leaders during the spotted owl
crisis, described the softwood fibers growing around Willapa Bay as the
strongest found anywhere in the world, save for a small area of New Zealand.
We may never know the source of the idea, but the city named for Stella and Leslie Raymond survived and evolved; after a bitter struggle; from the rip-roaring timber town that A. C. Little had shaped into the sedate, civilized community the Raymonds envisioned. Leslie Raymond was first, and always, a businessman. Stella’s tribute to her husband, written with the same understated good humor that characterized all her prose, says only of Leslie’s successes, “(He) became quite active in his real estate business, erecting seven business houses, three apartment buildings and many homes.” Stella could have also said that he built the city’s first water system and kept the spigots going (most of the time) for nine years before selling out to the city, and she could have added that while the Raymonds suffered reverses in the grim 1930s, they never had a business failure, a remarkable achievement in their city’s boom and bust pioneer days. No detailed listing of Leslie Raymond’s construction projects was found, but the Island was laid out with about 1,200 lots and in one way or another, Leslie sold them all. By their deaths the Raymonds had accumulated a fortune and it too has survived. Modest by today’s yardsticks but substantial for the era and community in which they lived, their estate made bequests of money, properties and annuities for cherished friends and employees, and established a trust fund which has paid out more than $1.5 million to worthy local individuals and charities and is still going strong. |
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Leslie and Stella Raymond; and their daisies; at their home on Tower Avenue. |
At the turn of the
new century those residents mindful of the community’s rare good fortune
to have available the Raymond Foundation, as well as the dwindling ranks
of geezers who remember the Raymonds’ private philanthropy, speak of the
couple with affectionate respect.
Not surprisingly, however, other locals speak of the Raymonds, particularly Leslie, with disdain, the operative adjectives being “just lucky” and “cheap,” or in a more polite formulation, “conservative.” The feeling is unmistakable that these Raymondites would have much happier memories of Leslie and Stella if they had died broke. Leslie is described as “quiet,” a “loner,” a “man no one really knew,” but as a stripling of 28 he demonstrated a quick wit to a South Bend Journal reporter. When asked if he was up to the task of making the soggy wetlands on the Willapa River into a city, Leslie answered, “I am only 28, but if you count the fun I’ve had, I’m nearly 50.” The interviewer added his own opinion of the youthful developer, “Though comparatively young in years, (Leslie) has an old head.” Leslie and the town aged together, but his infrequently revealed comic sense never deserted him. Late in his life he met up with young Zack Brown; the third generation to carry that name; on a downtown street. As recounted recently by Zack’s brother Del, the exchange began with a dig by Zack, “Mr. Raymond, if I had your money, I could make a lot more than you have.” “And if I was your age, I could make a lot more than I have,” Leslie shot back, not missing a beat. |
Lucy and Tom Roney. PCHS #1994.105.361 |
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| The Brown family
had history with Leslie and Stella Raymond, for the first Zack Brown, sheriff
of Pacific County, deeded 295.14 acres of Island property back to Stella
in 1898 when the buyers of the tract couldn’t make their mortgage payments
and he had to conduct a sheriff’s sale. Stella’s mother Lucy Johnson,
acting as guardian of the 15-year-old, had sold the property to Robert
R. Christie and his wife Mary C. Christie of Tacoma, John and Rebecca Hovey,
and Alexander and Dollie Brokaw for $25,000 in 1890. In 1897 Stella,
by then 23, bought it in for an outstanding balance of $11,805, or $40
an acre.
This may have been a fair estimate of what riverfront property, a portion of which was high ground, brought on the eve of the twentieth century. The lawsuit and the young couple’s subsequent adventures in the world of real estate all went to vindicate Lucy’s faith in them, and Stella’s ties to her “mamma” remained an important source of strength until her mother’s death in 1925. Almost all we know of Stella’s relationships with her mother, her husband and her many friends; as well as much of our insight into what really went on in the city during the early years of the 20th century; comes from Stella’s wonderful diaries. For instance, Lucy had married Sheriff Tom Roney in 1902, and when his term expired in 1904 the Roneys moved to a houseboat on Lake Washington up in Seattle. They sold their “ark” in 1909 and temporarily moved in with Leslie and Stella, who set aside a lot on Twelfth Street for them to build on. After a delay, however, Tom and Lucy decided to go back to North Cove, where Lucy had lived as a young married woman, greatly disappointing her daughter. “I HATE NORTH COVE,” Stella confided to her diary in capital letters. Her “hate” was a joke, of course, written only to make a point of how much she was going to miss Lucy. |
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Teenager Stella Johnson and her indomitable mother Lucy. PCHS #7-31-70-1.52. |
For an effervescent, outgoing woman, Stella wrote a lot. In addition to keeping a diary intermittently for 33 years, Stella prepared a delightful monograph, “Purporting To Be A History of Raymond.” She also sent back to the hometown Herald at least a dozen 2,000 word (or longer) dispatches as she and Leslie completed an eleven month world tour in 1924 and 1925. Stella wrote clean copy, stayed true to her narrative thread, and well used her broad vocabulary. When her judgments seem stuffy for today’s readership, it is because they matched her post-Victorian era. Stella’s journalism; both public and private; points to a woman who liked to write, and wrote well. |
| Stella spent much
of her time during the couple’s early years in the city making calls on
other married women, and not just those at her social level. As the
town filled up with new retailers and men who had taken mid- and upper-management
jobs in the burgeoning lumber industry, she reinforced Leslie’s importance
in the business community by offering a friendly welcoming face to the
wives.
Ruby Heath, widow of Jim Heath, founder of the Raymond Herald, offered a dispassionate view of Stella’s position in the community in a letter to local historian Ruth Dixon. Mayor A. C. Little and the Raymonds had jointly donated a lot to the Heaths so they could build a printing office at the site. “The two (Raymond) brothers, L. V. and George, ran the business, but Mrs. Raymond and her mother, Mrs. Tom Roney were the real owners of the Island,” Mrs. Heath wrote. In 1910 Stella described her hurried preparations for a railway trip to Goldendale after Leslie came home from the office one evening to tell her they had to accompany Mayor A. C. Little to the Southwest Development Association (a regional business group) meeting the next morning. The last minute plans could have been a result of the belated addition of the Raymonds to the city’s delegation, Leslie’s determination to keep a close watch on the dynamic, volatile Little when he was out of town, or many other reasons. Stella’s diary provides no clues, but the Raymonds clearly weren’t on board the train to Goldendale just for the partying. For Stella there definitely were times to draw the line on business socializing. In mid-November, 1910, she received a written invitation to Thanksgiving dinner from Jenny Little, the mayor’s wife. The Littles’ house was a place Stella did not want to be that day, or any day. She hastened over to see sister-in-law Hannah Raymond and explained the problem frankly. Hannah understood, of course, and issued the needed invitation right on the spot. Stella walked back home and immediately wrote a note to Jenny Little. It was brief, to the point and (sort of) truthful. “Thank you for the kind invitation for Thanksgiving. I regret we have already accepted an invitation from George and Hannah Raymond for that day....” Stella knew everybody and was always on the go, but she was a reader, too, and from the start pressed the city council to establish a library. It did in 1913, renting space at 519 Commercial Street for the facility and naming mill owner Charles L. Lewis, Mrs. Jacob Siler, wife of another lumberman, and Mrs. R. H. Burnside as the first board members. Two years later library board membership was enlarged to five and Stella and Dr. A. L. MacLennan were named new members. (The handsome Tudor library building, now on the National Registry of Historic Places, was erected in 1929 through a $25,000 city bond issue on land donated by the Lewis family. It is commonly but erroneously thought that the Lewises donated the building as well as the land.) As the years passed though, more and more of Stella’s time was taken up by card games. Remember, this was before television, or even radio, served as diversions. The games were held either during the afternoons with girl friends, or after dinner with Leslie and other couples, though often a substitute had to be brought in for Leslie when he was at a city council meeting, tinkering the city water system back into shape, or working late at the office. That she never once used her diary to criticize the play of a partner suggests she was a strictly social player who loved the opportunity to giggle and gossip between hands, and perhaps even during them. And if any money changed hands at the card table, she kept that fact out of her daily entries. Early in their marriage Leslie and Stella were often on the dance floor at parties, but in later years Stella seemed to shun such activity, possibly because she towered over so many potential dance partners, possibly also because her diary indicates that her feet were giving her increasing pain. |
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The Raymonds' Cottage in Grayland. |
Niece Arline Robinson
remembers a weekend when she and her mother Nora were house guests of the
Raymonds. Stella sent Leslie, Nora and Arline off to an Elks lodge
dance, but stayed home herself. There was another occasion when Arline
spotted the Raymonds across the dance floor at a big party in Long Beach.
Leslie was whirling around the floor with Huldamay Giesy, but Stella remained
on the sidelines, watching the fun.
Barbara Bridges Goodin knew both Leslie and Stella, who was a regular patron of the beauty salon Barbara was operating at age 19. Late in her life, in her seventies and beyond, Stella gave a lot of her personality to enliven even routine social situations and “always had a little joke for us” when she came in to have her hair done. |
The cottage at Seaview. |
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| Barbara also remembers
Leslie Raymond’s frugality. She and her young husband Vern rented
a second story flat above Leslie’s real estate office downtown and for
several weeks Barbara heard an almost musical tinkling outside her window
early Sunday mornings. Finally she looked out the window and saw
Leslie picking up empty beer bottles left behind by Saturday night revelers.
Perhaps the bottles could be turned in for a penny or two each.
She also remembers; ruefully; that the roof of their flat leaked despite a couple of tar patches applied by Leslie and his brother George, then both in their seventies. She and Vern finally left for drier quarters elsewhere. Stella could turn the charm both on and off, and sometimes she seemed uncomfortable with small children. Arline Robinson tells of going by the Raymonds with her mother and brother Archie one day. Stella invited Nora in, but thrust hard candy into the children’s hands and told them to “go out and play.” A skilled and practiced hostess who took great pleasure in the company of friends, Stella was in no way a name dropper, but she just had to tell Arline about one visitor. Baroness (of what principality, she did not disclose) Peggy de Gripenberg had once been a house guest at the Raymonds’ home on the Island. “The only royalty that ever stayed here,” she explained with a touch of pride. As collateral evidence Stella placed in her scrapbook a note from Baroness Peggy written on stationery from the elegant Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco and a 1941 Saturday Evening Post cover photo showing Peggy with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor as the threesome strolled down a dock at a luxury resort in the Bahama Islands where Baroness Peggy was employed as a greeter. As Leslie Raymond became a local legend in his own time for his thrift, a quality that undoubtedly helped his property management business survive in the lean years, he and Stella also showed they knew how to spend it. The Raymonds had vacation retreats in Seaview and Grayland, winters in southern California, a two-month journey to the Caribbean, Panama and Florida in 1912, a pioneering auto junket across the United States in 1916, and a fabulous eleven-month trip around the world in 1924 and 1925 that probably couldn’t be duplicated today at any cost. Yet at their deaths they established the munificent, enduring Raymond Foundation as well as leaving bequests to friends and employees remembered by surviving recipients as enormously generous (see Appendix). |
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Captain George H. Johnson. The title was probably honorary. PCHS #2002.14.2. |
A blister emerges from the sea
Everything the Raymonds had stemmed from The Island, a watery tract at the east edge of the present city that Stella bought back from Sheriff Zack Brown in 1899. This was where her father, Captain George Johnson, had spotted land for sale back in 1870 while sailing up the Willapa on his mail route. First he filed a homestead claim in 1871 on 178.69 acres. Later he bought an adjacent 116.45 acres from the Northern Pacific Railroad on November 30, 1874. The United States government issued Johnson a patent on his original homestead claim on June 23, 1879. Johnson did submit an affidavit for a homestead deed which has been preserved. It is witnessed by friends Sebastian Geisy and J. H. Whitcomb who swore that he had not only lived on the property since August 1, 1870, but had “planted ninety fruit trees thereon.” Johnson described the “dwelling house” he built as 20 by 30 feet, constructed of “sawed lumber’ and including seven doors and six windows. He had also built “two small barns” of 12 by 20 feet dimensions and a storehouse of 24 by 30 feet, all of sawed lumber. |
| Johnson, an immigrant
born in Skien, Norway, in 1829, a year after the famed dramatist Henrik
Ibsen was born there, went to sea at an early age and after landing in
San Francisco, became a member of the Vigilantes, a volunteer group of
citizens formed to restore order in the then lawless city.
In what was probably written by daughter Stella herself, she was said in the History of Washington by Spencer and Pollard, to have in her possession a certificate attesting to her father’s service in the organization. It was an era in which vigilantism did not yet carry with it the opprobrium it now has. By 1861 Johnson had moved north to Oregon Territory and been awarded a U. S. Mail contract for a route running from Astoria to Olympia. Early in the 1870s Capt. (a title he apparently bestowed on himself) Johnson had located in Oysterville and had another mail contract, this one from that village across the bay and up the Willapa to Giesy’s Crossing. In a version quite different from the bare bones title company language, Spencer and Pollard say Capt. Johnson bought the “homestead rights” of two brothers named Perkins to some 400 acres at the confluence of the Willapa and South Fork. Stella’s version, recounted in her local history, is even more dramatic. She says her father bought the “squatters rights” of the Perkins brothers, who went south to Oregon, where they were killed by Indians, “one being found with a stake driven through his body and into the ground.” By then married to Lucy Paulding, Capt. Johnson brought his wife to their new homestead, as he legally had to if he was a homesteader, and it was in the house he had already built there that Stella Johnson was born on August 22, 1875. Described by Stella as a “blister” formed from a bubble of gas which came to the surface of the earth many eons ago, the Johnsons’ property was soon popularly and more easily called “The Island.” In a paper she read to the Tuesday Club of Raymond in January, 1920, and reprinted in the Raymond Herald on February 6, 1920, Stella described the “blister” as she imagined it to have been before it was developed by white settlers. In a lyric voice that was often missing in her poetry, Stella wrote these lines: Around the blister there slowly emerged a low-lying land which seemed to hesitate between God’s command ordaining the sea and the land. Cut into innumerable channels by the erratic windings of tidal sloughs this land could be explored perhaps by amphibious or winged creatures but was ill adapted for the uses and purposes of more limited beings.As it grew a little higher above the surface of mean tides, a tall coarse grass, almost tropical in abundance, began to mask its muddy surface, and, in the mysterious way in which things have their beginnings, the seeds of wild blue asters, rose colored wild hollyhocks, yellow tiger lilies and dainty blue lupine became mingled with the grass and on higher points scrubby tideland spruce, wild crabapple took root and grew. |
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North Cove Lifesaving Station. Captain George Johnson commanded this station while pursuing his real estate activities. PCHS #1993.80.65. |
Birds would come
by wing to nest there and deer sometimes visited the blister and its surrounding
salt marshes. Harsh voiced cranes...stood watch in shallow waters,
dipping a cool and wriggly breakfast up from around their feet. The
blister itself gradually grew a creditable forest of tall spruce and fir,
with close-standing lowlier neighbors of alder, vine maple spirea and other
trees and shrubs.
Capt. Johnson, wife Lucy and daughter Stella stayed on the Island long enough to validate his claim but not much longer, before returning to more civilized surroundings in Oysterville and then moving into quarters at the North Cove rescue station, where Capt. Johnson was officer in charge. |
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| After Leslie and
Stella built their own home on the Island property in 1908, the original
house became a part of its garage, and with it was finally leveled by new
owners in 1999 to make room for a two story rental duplex.
When George Johnson died in 1881, Lucy began a long widowhood which lasted until she married Sheriff Tom Roney, the man who reluctantly hanged convicted murderer Lum Yu, in 1902. Before Johnson’s death Lucy helped him round up his volunteer crew for rescue work at the Lifesaving Service Station and helped him run a general store. After his death she earned a living from the steady flow of boarders at her home and decided to formalize her role as an innkeeper. The sign on her door said “Hotel Norwood.” As busy a life she led, so crammed with the responsibilities and minutiae of an intensely practical day-to-day existence, Lucy Johnson never neglected to teach her daughter the importance of her parents’ remarkable lives and heritage. More than a century later niece Arline Robinson still maintains a thick scrapbook outlining the lives of her illustrious Paulding forebears in upstate New York during the Revolutionary War and well into the 19th Century. The scrapbook, with an accompanying family narrative by Stella herself, is inscribed: “To Hulda May Giesy Buell for pioneer records - with other pertinent clippings, etc. (signed) Stella J. Raymond. Please don’t destroy nor give to the Goodwill. Try Historical Society or Public Library.” Mrs. Buell, a member of the pioneer family, was a friend, long time employee at Leslie’s real estate office and legatee in the Raymond wills. One of Stella’s forebears, her great grandfather, was John Paulding, one of the “three honest militiamen” who caught Major John Andre, a British spy who had plotted with revolutionary General Benedict Arnold to turn over the American redoubt at West Point, NY, to the British during the American Revolution. Andre, dressed as a farmer, would have been allowed to pass through the lines, but militiaman Paulding didn’t like the fit of Andre’s boots. On Paulding’s order Andre took them off. Stuffed therein were plans for the treasonous plot. Andre was hanged but Arnold escaped to England, where he spent the rest of his life. |
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| A statue in Tarrytown, NY, commemorates
Paulding’s extraordinary service, and both a county and town in western
Ohio are named for him. Stella Raymond qualified for membership in
the Daughters of the American Revolution through John Paulding. Lucy’s
father, John, was descended from the second of his three wives.
The family is equally proud of John’s brother (and Stella’s great uncle), Admiral Hiram Paulding, a mid-19th century American writer whose best known book was his tale of a Pacific Ocean whaling cruise, “Journal of A Cruise of the U. S. Schooner Dolphin,” long out of print but available on the internet in July, 2001, for $30.96. Yet another Paulding, author James Kirk Paulding, was a member of the “Knickerbocker group,” a literary coterie which gathered around Washington Irving. James Kirk’s best-known poem was “The Backwoodsman,” 16-lines in iambic pentameter, which appeared in at least one anthology of 19th century American poetry. Our Basil beat the lazy sun next day And bright and early had been on his way, But that world he saw e’en yesternight Seemed faded like a vision from his sight. One endless chaos spread before his eyes, No vestige left of earth or azure skies. A boundless nothingness reigned everywhere, Hid the green fields and silent all the air. As looked the traveller for the world below, The lively morning breeze began to blow, The magic curtain rolled in mists away, And a gay landcape laughed upon the day. As light the fleeting vapours upper glide, Like sheeted spectres on the mountain-side, New objects open to his wondering view, Of various forms and combinations new. The prolific Paulding clan operated from a castle-like home on the Hudson River in those years. Of the 12 children, all but Stella’s grandfather John stayed in the neighborhood. John opted to head west and got as far as St. Louis before entering the hat business (in which he had some experience in Peekskill, NY) and marrying a Miss Ann Dillon, who gave birth to several sons before completing their family with Lucy in 1850. As recounted by Stella Raymond, Lucy was only three when the family relocated again. Thousands of people were headed west on the Oregon Trail in the summer of 1853, but the Pauldings were the only ones going it absolutely alone. Able to travel faster than the long caravans, they had no trouble from either the Indians or illness and faced only one major problem. According to Stella’s undated manuscript of her family’s “earlier and simpler days” John brought along a second freight wagon loaded with butter and cheese, presumably for sale to the folks in Oregon. Unfortunately, John’s wagonload of non-refrigerated dairy products melted and ran on the first warm day. The intrepid Pauldings made it to Fort Vancouver, where tiny Lucy had an opportunity to charm Gen. Ulysses Grant by chasing a ball into his tent during a playground game at the fort. Then it was down to St. Paul in the Willamette Valley, and a final move north again to Pacific County. John Paulding had been well over 40 when he married and didn’t quite make it to their new home. He died in 1853 and is buried at Seaview. Widow Annie Dillon Paulding married Charles Brady, founder of the town of Brady, WA, east of Montesano and lived with him in Bruceport until her death in 1863. Fourteen when her mother died, Lucy continued her education at a convent in Vancouver, WA, and later worked for her room and board with a family in Astoria. Stella Raymond’s family narrative skips over details of the meeting of Lucy Paulding and George Johnson, but it probably was not unlike her own introduction a generation later to Leslie Raymond. Johnson had obtained a mail contract for a route from Astoria to Oympia. Much of the complicated run was subcontracted, but it went this way:
Twenty-one years younger than Capt. Johnson, Lucy must have demonstrated an unusual maturity to win his love. They were married August 23, 1874, in San Francisco at the home of the Powelson family, parents of her friend Clara Powelson whom she was visiting. One year later; less one day; their only child, Stella, was born on “The Island.” (Stella’s death certificate, based on information provided by John Weir, a friend and neighbor, inaccurately states she was born in North Cove.) |
William C. Raymond, Leslie's father. PCHS #1993.80.21. |
A bright and promising future
Leslie was born September 7, 1874, in Winchendon, Massachusetts, 50 miles northwest of Boston and just three miles from the New Hampshire border. Now a town of more than 9,000 people, Winchendon had a population of only 4,000 when Leslie was born, the second son of William and Julia Raymond. For a middle name, his parents selected the surname of a distant shirttail relative, Martin Vosburg, a blacksmith in Macdona, New York, but they never explained Vosburg’s importance in their lives. The 1880 census available in the National Archives files in Seattle describes Leslie’s father’s occupation in Victorian script as a “painter.” Neither Stella nor her brother-in-law George, both of whom wrote extensively about the Raymond family forebears, ever mentioned what William did for a living, suggesting that whatever field he was in, it probably added little luster to the family heritage. |
A street in Winchendon, Massachusetts. From album PCHS #1993.13.4 |
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| The first Raymond
to reach America was William, a steward in the Company of Laconia, which
reached Little Harbor, now Portsmouth, New Hampshire in 1632. One
of the early Raymonds is thought to have testified in one of the Salem
witch trials, and another William Raymond served on the winning side in
the Revolutionary War.
By the turn of the 20th century Raymonds were living in several Massachusetts towns which Leslie and Stella visited in 1916 and at the end of their 1924-25 world tour. Snapshots taken at family reunions show well dressed people and substantial houses. A Winchendon town hall spokesperson said recently that the city had lost its railroads, textile mills, and woodworking plants in the century and a quarter since Leslie Raymond was born there, but is doing well as a bedroom community for larger cities in north Massachusetts. “Even Boston is creeping out our way,” she said cheerfully. Curiously, though Raymond, WA, has lost much and Winchendon, MA, all of its manufacturing, the stodgy textile and furniture town that Leslie left is now three times the size of the boom town that he helped to create. The Raymond name is still well known in Winchendon, and Leslie’s career in Raymond, WA, (one of six Raymonds in the Britannica Atlas of the United States) is noted in the town’s history. The city’s real distinction, though, is that there is only one other Winchendon in the whole world; in England. Leslie had completed only nine and a half grades of schooling in 1890 when he made the decision to seek his fortune out west, a choice not unusual in the late 19th century. He joined his older brother in Portland, Oregon, where George was working in the office of the Northern Pacific Railroad, as was George’s fiancée, Hannah Croxton, a telegrapher and member of a pioneer Oregon family. George soon obtained another and presumably better position with the railroad in Tacoma, and after Leslie and Stella went into business for themselves seemed equivocal about working for his younger brother. He and Hannah finally made a decision to do so, and moved in March, 1910 to Raymond with their only child, daughter Ruth Thayer Raymond, born in 1898. George and Leslie’s father, William Raymond, followed his sons west by 1906, and alternated his residence, moving from the home of one son to the other every three months or so, both in Tacoma and Raymond. He died in 1914. |
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George Raymond, Leslie's brother. PCHS #1993.80.172. |
In the view of one
friend of both men, the brothers never really competed with each other,
for George realized early on he lacked Leslie’s leadership qualities, but
it is a credit to both that they worked together compatibly as “Raymond
Bros., Real Estate” for 40 years. Stella’s diary indicates that she
doted on her niece and became good friends with her sister-in-law.
Leslie, barely 16 when he arrived in Portland and without the business education or experience his brother had, obtained a job as an express messenger, and took up competitive bicycling as a member of the well known Sterns and Imperial teams. He was clocked in at 1 minute, 36 seconds for the mile, and at the age of 20, won one and two mile events at a Seattle Cycling Club meet. He also pedaled all the way from Los Angeles to Tijuana, Mexico, and back to San Diego. The Olympic, a prominent bicycling periodical, stated, “Leslie V. Raymond is one of the best known and undoubtedly the most popular man upon the racing path throughout the Webfoot State today ... A bright and promising future lies before him.” While Leslie continued to ride a bike just for the fun of it for many years, the success envisioned by the bicycling writer was won not in athletic endeavor, but in real estate management. Very little in the young man’s background could have prepared him for this field, but he had the good fortune to marry a trusting, supportive wife and (through her) obtain the backing of Lucy Paulding Johnson, who earned lots of spurs as a businesswoman during the long widowhood that preceded her marriage to Tom Roney. |
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Stella Johnsonas a student at Annie Wright Academy in Tacoma. PCHS #7-31-70-1.41. |
The couple’s melodramatic wedding
Stella’s education included a business school in California, not described more fully in the family history, and Annie Wright Academy in Tacoma, where she was a member of the class of 1893. These years “in the outside world” showed clearly how important Lucy believed it was for Stella to obtain a good education and an exposure to a more sophisticated culture. Stella, though she repeatedly showed an ability to get along with people at all levels of the frontier society in which she lived, never wanted to be thought of as a simple rustic hausfrau. Leslie and Stella met when they were about 20, he older by a year and an express messenger for the Northern Pacific Railroad on the branch line from Ocosta to Aberdeen, she commuting from Westport to Aberdeen and her job there as a legal secretary. |
A photo of The Raymonds' store and office in Westport taken in 1902, the year Leslie and Stella moved to Raymond. PCHS #1993.51.4. |
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| Looking at photos
of both from that time in their lives, it isn’t a bit difficult to see
the basis of an immediate physical attraction. Leslie was about five
feet seven, dark haired with the compact, muscular good looks of the champion
bicycle rider that he was. Stella was a tall woman, dark haired,
long limbed, an inch or so taller than her husband to be, without a bit
of coquetry in her demeanor but with an appealing, wide eyed openness that
must have made a veritable chatterbox of the shy youth from the east.
Years later Stella joked that she knew Leslie’s line of work from his scent as soon as she met him on the train, for he was accompanying a load of fresh fish to Aberdeen from the docks at Westport, where Stella’s mother then ran a general store and rooming house. Writing in the 1965 compendium, Willapa Country, Huldamay Giesy Buell placed Stella’s job in Westport and said nothing about the smelly fish, watering down an enjoyable, if apocryphal, yarn. Whatever Leslie’s aroma, good or bad, the die was cast. Regrettably, Stella’s diaries contain nothing about her courtship, whether there had been other young men in her life, or even any hint of her feelings for her fiancé in the years before their marriage. Her story of their years together begins with both well out of their teens and past the first glorious flush of romance. When they married, Leslie had been on his own in the west nine years and Stella in the working world two or three years, long enough for both to form firm opinions on the type of work they wanted to do, where they wanted to do it, and most importantly, what sort of a mate they wanted. Nothing in the record suggests that either began adult life with any sort of grand, destructive illusions about the other. As for Leslie, what else could this quiet, quiet man have been seeking except a pretty girl with an upbeat, bubbly personality, someone who would listen to him and make him into a bigger person? As for Stella, despite the fact that she left so much more of herself for us to study, interested readers will have to decide for themselves how closely this vigorous, complicated woman came to obtaining the life she saw for herself in her early adult years. The Raymonds must have loved to tell the story of their wedding on Dec. 29, 1897, for the tale was kept alive and finally incorporated in a newspaper announcement of their fiftieth anniversary celebration. It reads like pure melodrama with an added hint of bedroom farce. Leslie and Stella had decided to be married in Portland, where George and Hannah Raymond, his brother and sister-in-law, lived. It is uncertain whether Stella’s mother Lucy was in the wedding party that boarded the train in Ocosta, but no suggestion of an elopement ever crept into accounts of the trip, which was interrupted by a rainstorm that flooded the tracks at Oakville. At 8:30 p.m., railroad conductor Stamper went off in search of a minister to tie the knot. “We are engaged in a just cause and justice must triumph,” he vowed. Soon he found the parsonage of a Rev. Harris, who was imprisoned therein by two feet of water. Answering the entreaties of Stamper, Rev. Harris made his way on an improvised raft to D. E. Vernon’s home, where Leslie and Stella waited anxiously, and conducted the wedding ceremony in the presence of a Miss Nellie Glover, railway postal clerk A. B. Brown, Vernon and Stamper. Only through Vernon’s generosity was the couple able to spend their wedding night together. He turned over to the young couple “possession of his residence and sought temporary quarters elsewhere,” in the knowing words of a newspaper account, but by morning the Chehalis River had returned to its banks and the newly marrieds continued on their way to Portland. Justice had indeed triumphed. Leslie soon left the express business. He perhaps didn’t realize it immediately, but when he took a job as manager of Lucy Johnson’s general store in Westport he was developing his management skills. It was nothing less than a trial run for the much more complicated job of building a new city on the Willapa. |
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| Apparently still thinking the
plant might be fitted in a location downstream in South Bend proper, editor
Hazeltine asked his readers: “How badly do you want the factory?
Other places are after it who offer free sites. South Bend has no
free sites, but we have cheap logs, which is quite an advantage and if
our property owners do the right thing the factory will be located here.”
Rumors of the new town upstream immediately began circulating, and with the Raymonds’ option in hand, Little was able to arrange financing for what became West Coast Veneer Co. at the confluence of the South Fork and the Willapa River. It was a done deal and by April, 1903, construction was underway. No record was found indicating whether the Raymonds gave or sold the plant site to West Coast Veneer, but when the land was transferred on county records, it went directly from the Raymonds to the veneer company. Editor’s Note: See previous discussion of Raymond mill site property transfers. Nor does the bare bones title transfer fully explain why Little’s promotion wind up with the more desirable site at the very confluence of the two rivers, while the Siler-Owens-Cram project was relegated to access to one river. The guess here is that Little and Leslie were allies of a sort and A. C. convinced L. V. that the two river location was worth so much more both men would profit by selling it for cash. Little was placed in charge of construction when financing was arranged for the company, reportedly by Iowa farmers, but the company ran into problems almost immediately and went into receivership a year later. After refinancing, Little was left out when the Willapa Lumber Company built a mill on the same site. The Weyerhaeuser Timber Company bought a controlling interest in Willapa Lumber 1931 and it became Mill W in the Weyco complex. On September 18, 1903, the Journal had another scoop. “Raymond is the name of the new mill at the mouth of the South Fork,” the story began. Notice that the story was still talking about a mill, not a mill town; South Bend may have still been hoping the development would turn out to be a new section within the existing city, not an entirely new, and competitive, city. “The name was agreed upon at a meeting held the first of the week.” Notice also that the story doesn’t say exactly where the meeting was held, or even who attended. Those in attendance were willing to spill the beans to editor Hazeltine if he agreed to keep their names out of the paper. Leslie Raymond “has pursued a liberal policy throughout in offering sites for mills on his property ... The name is a good one and the compliment a deserved one,” the Journal soothed. Note the site was described as his property, not his and his wife’s. (An imaginative account of unknown authorship found in the files of the Pacific County Historical Society tells the story of the city’s establishment much differently. In it, Messrs. Siler and Cram (not Owens) are floating equipment from a burned out mill upstream from South Bend, where they cannot obtain land at a reasonable price. They are invited by A. C. Little to build at the juncture of the Willapa and the South Fork, a site he has obtained in a land trade with L. V. Raymond. The text is dated “1902,” but the”2” has been added in cursive over another typed figure, most likely a “7.” (In a more romantic version published in a promotional booklet, “Resources and Opportunities” Little is rowing up the Willapa one day when he comes upon the South Fork and says to himself, this is the place for a “future great seaport.” Since business results for 1912 are included in “Resources,” the booklet could not have been published earlier than 1913. This would date Little’s boat ride of “little more than eight years ago” as having occurred in 1904 or 1905. Neither the PCHS nor the “Resources” version of the city’s founding appear reliable to the authors of this text.) Within a few months, February 23, 1904, Raymond had its own post office, a touchstone of municipal legitimacy, and Leslie Raymond was the first postmaster. According to an article in the Raymond Advertiser of February 23, 1954, the office consisted of “a few crude cubbyholes” at Raymond Mercantile, a general store at the southeast corner of First and Duryea streets owned by Leslie Raymond and August Rugger. By 1907, Leslie was heavily involved in politics, real estate and the water company. It was more than one man could handle, so he resigned as postmaster and sold out his interest in Raymond Mercantile to Rugger. |
George Raymond at his desk in the Raymond Bros. real estate office shortly after he joined the firm in 1910. PCHS #1993.51.2. |
Raymond Land Co. takes shape
It had to be a heady time for Leslie and Stella Raymond, still in their twenties, but there was a lot to do to build a real city. The town was platted in October, 1904, resulting in a fascinating map of streets overlaid on the sloughs that snaked through the marshy plain between the Willapa and the South Fork. Fully half of the downtown area as well as much of the area to the east was under water at high tide. |
| At the outset, the
Raymonds owned only about half of the “Island,” and apparently did not
immediately transfer any of their property to Raymond Land and Improvement
Co., when they joined with South Bend attorney John T. Welsh, J. B. Duryea
and W. W. Cram to incorporate the company on December 1, 1903.
Pacific County Title Company records show that RL&I didn’t take title to any of what became the city until 1905, when it acquired a chunk of the Vail DLC through agent Perry Shepard to create Riverdale. RL&I proceeded to trade part of the former Vail DLC to Stella and Leslie Raymond for the North part of what became the 1st Addition to Raymond (an area bounded on the west by the alley between 3rd and 4th streets, 9th street on the east, Franklin Street on the north, and Heath Street on the south). RL&I agent Shepard acquired the south part of the 1st Addition from the Northern Pacific Railroad. Title records also reveal that Charles Blake owned the peninsula created by a sharp bend in the South Fork just upstream from the railroad bridge. Blake deeded this property adjacent to the mill property to Siler on April 6, 1903. It was more than a year later, on June 1, 1904, when Leslie and Stella Raymond actually deeded to Siler the South Fork frontage where he had built his mill. An even month later, on July 1, 1904, the Raymonds transferred ownership of the next door frontage (on which A. C. Little and J. B. Duryea had announced they held an option a year and a half earlier) to West Coast Veneer. |
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A map of Raymond streets shows them overlaid on the sloughs which twisted through the city. J.A. Shotwell. |
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Harry C. Heermans. |
Interestingly, the Raymonds
made another deal in 1904 to square off their Island holdings by acquiring
from Ruth Blake a tract bounded by Fourth, Commercial, First and Alder
streets and extending across the South Fork to Highway 101.
The Title Company records, while valuable, do not fully explain how RL&I became such a force in the development of Raymond. What real ownership Leslie and Stella had in the company is uncertain. They may have been no more than hometown fronts, or they might have been proportionate owners with side agreements linking their property to other acreage held in the name of RL&I. Harry Heermans, an Olympia and Hoquiam financier, became president of RL&I in 1905. The Raymonds were off the board of directors by 1910, but by 1906 Leslie was already selling against RL&I, and in 1910 he and brother George were advertising their real estate office, “Raymond Bros.” against RL&I in the local newspapers. |
| How much cash Heermans
put into RL&I isn’t recorded, but he has been given credit for coming
up with a plan for the Raymonds and RL&I to take alternate lots as
they were platted. In this way, each had a virtually fool proof veto
over the other’s development schemes. Though rivals, Leslie Raymond
shared a bond with Heermans; they both knew how to make money. It
was an art that A. C. Little never mastered.
RL&I incorporator John T. Welsh and his brother Martin Welsh, who moved to Raymond and became city attorney there, were dominant figures in their profession in the Harbor area. They covered all the bases, John; a wet Democrat in South Bend, Martin; a dry Republican in Raymond. Martin’s legal credentials survived a close call in the famous 1913 conspiracy case. John and one of his sons, Burke Welsh, both served as Pacific County prosecutor, an office held by the latter when he was fatally injured in an auto accident on Pluvius hill on December 7, 1939. |
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John T. Welsh. PCHS #8-30-70-4 (33). |
Cram was an Aberdeen
businessman who had joined Siler’s sawmill as head of sales (or chief “rustler”
in the quaint slang of the times) but later split with Siler and formed
his own mill company.
Born in The Dalles, Oregon, Cram began his business life clerking in dry goods, book and stationery and confectionery stores before going into the wholesale fish trade and moving to Aberdeen to enter the salmon packing business. It was undoubtedly in Aberdeen that he met Little. J. B. Duryea, listed in the incorporation papers as living in Tacoma, knew Little there and joined with him in 1902 to incorporate the Commercial Trout Company, a firm which from its articles of incorporation had the same sort of plans for the town of Sultan, WA, that Raymond Land and Development had for the city of Raymond. J. B. Duryea is something of a mystery. He doesn’t appear in Tacoma or Raymond city directories of the early years, but was listed briefly as an officer of Raymond Mercantile. He may have worked there under Leslie Raymond and August Rugger, but his main function probably was to provide seed money for Little’s plans. Two other of the five Duryea brothers also moved to Raymond. George P. (or G. Perle) Duryea was listed in the Raymond city directory for 1910 as a sawyer living at First and Ellis St., and earlier was identified as a partner in the West Coast Veneer and Manufacturing Co. Married when he came to town in 1903, G. Perle spent his entire working life in the mills, and retired from Weyerhaeuser as head rig sawyer in 1951. Seventeen lines of whimsical doggerel written by G. P. in the style of Jerome Kern’s “Old Man River” appeared in the Weyerhaeuser Magazine in March, 1952. It concluded: But he who sawed them will be forgotten, As that old sawmill keeps on running along. |
Martin Welsh. Courtesy of BPOE Lodge #1292. |
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| The Duryea name
is preserved in local history mainly because its first letter fit right
in with surveyor Dion’s grand plan for naming the Raymond streets numerically
from west to east and alphabetically from south to north; Alder, Blake,
Commercial, Duryea, Ellis, Franklin.
A. C. Little was appointed manager of RL&I but didn’t become a director until Leslie and Stella left the board and the company was recapitalized on January 4, 1910. Heermans, the only college educated and professional man in the RL&I organization, earned B.A. and M.A. degrees at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT, read law at an office in his hometown of Corning, NY, and was owner-operator of that city’s waterworks for 13 years. Heermans moved on to St. Paul, MN, formed the Ontario Land Company and continued west to Hoquiam, where he bought the waterworks and dealt in real estate. He then went to Olympia, where he bought another waterworks, ran it a while, and sold it to the city in 1916. Heerman’s biographical sketch in “Washington West of the Cascades” may be unexceeded for flattery. It concludes: “His business affairs ... have been carefully and wisely planned. He readily discriminates between the essential and nonessential in business matters and Hoquiam and other sections of the state have profited largely by his cooperation in the work of promoting public progress.” The sketch says nothing about the Raymond water system, which was owned by Leslie Raymond from 1906 on, but Heermans may have been involved in an informal way in its design. Building a waterworks was right up Heermans’ alley and was one of the powers of RL&I, as specified in its articles of incorporation. RL&I’s business practices were sometimes suspect and the firm had trouble paying its bills, but Leslie Raymond never had to take the heat personally. One political foe was clearly talking about RL&I incorporators and Mayor A. C. Little when he vilified a “class of sharp edged business sharks” in Raymond and South Bend. This enemy, county attorney and later Judge Henry Ward Beecher Hewen, couldn’t quite bring himself to say anything mean about Leslie and Stella, however. They were above the fray. |
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A. C. Little, first mayor of Raymond. Courtesy of the BPOE lodge #1292. |
Alexander C. Little elected first mayor
Raymond Land and Improvement served to provide a niche in the city’s power structure for Alexander C. Little, who went on to serve almost ten one-year terms as the city’s first mayor, 1907-11 and 1913-18. Little left RL&I in about 1915, and after an ignominious defeat in a 1917 referendum, he left town and sank into obscurity before his death in California in 1932. He was all but ignored in the city’s annals for half a century, but as its political structure took on a more liberal hue in the 1990s interest in his career picked up. |
A. C. Little's Raymond home. Note portrait of A. C. on settee pillow. PCHS #1994.104.161. |
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| Born in Crete, NE,
in 1858 if his death certificate is correct, or Charles City, IA, in 1859,
as news accounts stated during his life, Little arrived in Aberdeen by
the early 1890s and won a one-year term as mayor there in 1893, but when
Clyde Weatherwax reclaimed the job a year later, Little suffered an embarrassing
defeat in a race for the city council. Then he was able to ally himself
with John Rogers, Democratic candidate for governor, and when Rogers won,
was appointed state fish commissioner in 1897, serving in that position
until 1902, when Rogers died and his successor appointed another person
to the post.
By then Little had his eye on the Willapa area (among others) as a new base, and a story in the South Bend Journal on June 24, 1898, said he had promised two new fish hatcheries to Willapa Harbor. In 1904 he lost a race for state representative, but the same year he was elected Pacific County chairman for the Democratic party. Even as his own promotion, West Coast Veneer (which had installed the world’s largest peeler, able to handle logs 100 inches in diameter) went into receivership in early 1905, Little was demonstrating his usefulness to the sawmill operators and assumed leadership of the move to incorporate Raymond as a third-class city. As a Democrat, he offered balance to an enterprise heavily represented by Republican businessmen, and as the former mayor of Aberdeen he knew the ropes in municipal government. It is also reasonable to assume that Little sold himself to RL&I as someone who could help the company structure government of a new city, Raymond, more favorably to the mill owners than would be possible if it were simply tacked onto South Bend, where the RL&I owners could hardly expect any concessions. When the city’s population was comfortably above the required minimum of 1,500, a petition was filed June 21, 1907 by 93 residents seeking Raymond’s incorporation as a third class city. Leslie Raymond’s was the very first signature; it was clear that he was the number one poster boy for incorporation. Even Napoleon de Grace Dion , the surveyor who had named the streets, signed on and only six residents petitioned against incorporation. Thomas H. Dixon, John Thompson, Fred V. Nielsen, J. H. Miller, Gottfried Zangg and R. F. Armstrong had two gripes: one, they were here first and didn’t need (or want to pay for) any more government; and two: the incorporators were motivated mainly by a desire to profit financially. This last was an argument with which Leslie Raymond and Alexander C. Little certainly agreed. The county board approved the incorporation of Raymond on July 17, 1907, and a full fledged city had been born. First there would be an election, and on August 3, the voters went to the polls and 235 of them chose the unopposed A. C. Little to the office of mayor. |
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| The slated candidates for city
council had only token opposition. Leslie V. Raymond received 227
votes and others selected were W. S. Cram, C. F. Cathcart, T. H. Donovan,
Floyd Lewis, Charles Myers and W. G. Shumway. Neal Stupp, a Democratic
Party ally of Mayor Little, was elected city clerk. At the end of
the year an election for full one-year terms was held, but it proved to
be mostly a rerun of the first balloting. L. V. was opposed by S.
L. Dennis (Shepard and Dennis Transfer) and won reelection, 181-42.
The first council meeting was held August 14, 1907, and it saw passage of a resolution giving the Raymond Light and Water Company (meaning Leslie Raymond) a franchise to provide “pure and fresh water for fire protection, domestic and other lawful uses.” Whether Leslie sidestepped the telephone and electric franchises, or simply wasn’t invited into the deals, is not clear. He would soon have his hands full with the water company and probably was not unhappy to sit on the sidelines while electric and telephone service was established in the city. With the help of attorney Martin Welsh, Mayor Little had things well organized at the council’s second meeting August 21. It saw 32 ordinances passed, most of them undoubtedly boilerplate from other cities, but a massive clerical job nevertheless. Typewriters, though well established for office use, were apparently still unavailable in Raymond, indicating the city’s frontier location and its organizers lack of ready cash. Someone at city hall had to copy each one of the ordinances which, in remarkably legible, well preserved cursive, are still on file at city hall. Ordinance number five dealt with the liquor trade, and while it sailed through the council in 1907, the issue was simmering. Six years later sawmill owner Elmer E. Case gave Little a one year breather as mayor in 1912 and the issue erupted as soon as Little reclaimed the post in January, 1913. It grew into a huge controversy because of moral considerations, the political power involved, and the importance of tavern licensing fees to the city budget. In 1911, for instance, the city’s tax receipts were only $5,000 but 16 taverns paid license fees of $16,000 at the rate of $1,000 per tavern; total city expenses that year were $44,000. (Things have changed; by the turn of the 21st century, there was just one tavern (plus three private clubs) left in Raymond, and its license cost $25 per year.) Other ordinances passed the second meeting including dog licensing (introduced by L. V. Raymond), vagrancy, the keeping of swine in the city, sidewalk repair, appointment of a street superintendent, and a prohibition on women congregating in barrooms. The council voted to rent first floor quarters in the Raymond Trust Company building for $15 a month, and formally appointed Martin C. Welsh as city attorney. A search of council minutes for that first year failed to reveal how much Welsh was billing for his services, nor how much Little was paid as mayor. Probably not a whole lot. Records for 1922, the earliest year for which state archives are available, show the mayor was paid $500 that year. Charges by the Herald, official city newspaper because it was the only one with a local office, were, however, meticulously recorded in the minutes every month. L. V. Raymond was named chairman of the water and light committee at the second meeting, and it wasn’t more than a month before he felt the pressure, for on September 11 the council passed a resolution telling Chairman L. V. to confer with the Raymond Light and Water Company (himself) “on improving service.” That same meeting saw a squabble with Pacific Telephone and Telegraph and passage of a resolution telling the company to pull up its poles from city streets. Harrumph. Things were soon patched up, of course, but it was apparent from the start that Raymond would be a contentious kind of a town. |
| L. V. and A. C. quarrel over Case water deal
Leslie and A. C. Little were business partners in Raymond Light and Water Co. well before the city was incorporated in 1907. Why they parted ways isn’t clear, though the company’s original name indicates that originally they must have had hopes of obtaining both the electric and water franchises. The company’s name was changed to Raymond Water Co. |
When the city was weighing water supply options in 1935, city engineer Buckingham prepared a map showing Leslie Raymond's original Butte Creek tunnel at right center. The tunnel, running under Highway 101, turned out to be 1,457 feet long, 107 feet longer than designed thirty years earlier. 24 |
| Initially also, the Siler Mill,
Willapa Lumber, Little and Raymond were all 25 percent partners, but the
two companies dropped out, trading their stock for an agreement by Raymond
to provide them with free water for 49 years.
In April, 1906 Stella’s diary reveals that her husband and Little were fighting over their deal with another mill owner, Elmer Case. It is a tantalizing entry, for we don’t learn whose side each was on, but since Little and Case would become fierce enemies by 1913, odds are that L. V. wanted to go easy on Case and A. C. sought to tighten the screws. A few days later Stella wrote that Little was so angry he “renounces all trade agreements on lots in the first and second additions.” Lot trading was a high art at RL&I. Leslie may have gotten the best of Little, who had figured out a way to get even. And then, out of the blue, on May 25 Little agreed to sell Leslie his share of the water system and land for $10 per acre. Leslie needed $2,700 in a hurry, and they met Stella’s mother, Lucy Roney, in Seattle to make a pitch to bankers there. It was no use; they were turned down cold and the outlook for the water company deal was bleak until they thought of W. Richard Marion down in Bay Center. Letters from Marion, a leading oysterman and banker, to L. V. in 1906 and 1907 describe the transaction. Why was L. V. able to turn to a businessman down on the bay in his hour of need? Because Marion knew that Stella’s mother was a woman who owned property, knew how to handle adversity, and would keep her promises. Marion and his in-laws, the Wilsons, leading citizens of Wilsonville (near Bay Center), shared a pioneer bond with Lucy Roney. With her on the note Marion knew he would get his money back. His letter to L. V. closed: “In regard to the loan, I think we can fix that all right.” A year later Marion agreed to give L. V. more time. “In regard to using the money longer, I will not want it for six months anyhow, and maybe longer,” and after another year L. V. was able to retire the debt by obtaining a bank loan. L. V. must not have realized the real reason why W. R. Marion made the loan to him, for he wrote Marion again, recommending he make a loan to one of L. V.’s new business friends. The answer was polite but curt: “In regard of a loan of $1,000 for Mr. Kettner, I will say at present I have not got any cash on hand I want to loan. Yours very truly, W. R. Marion.” Okay, so Leslie had full control of the water system, but who designed it is something of a mystery. Leslie Raymond was certainly no civil engineer, and whether city engineer John D. Henry or an independent consultant was involved isn’t discussed in water department records which go back only as far as the 1920s. In an expansive mood, Henry explained to the Journal on October 11, 1907, that he was already surveying the South Fork as a water source “for a city of 70,000.” It seems likely that Harry Heermans was looking over their shoulders, and might have saved everyone plenty of grief if he had looked closer. The system didn’t work very well, in large part because of the growing demands of the lumber and shingle mills. The influx of new residents was another factor, and a third was the initial decision to build the plant without any storage except a pond up at the Butte Creek intake. The free water for Siler and Willapa Lumber was a trade off that caused big legal trouble for several years. From the record, water purification was still an undiscovered art at the Raymond Water Company. (As late as 1922, Stella and a dozen or more girl friends went swimming in a South Fork pond used for drinking water storage.) All these problems came down on Leslie Raymond’s shoulders. He was the top guy, and the bottom guy, too. When there was a leak in the pipe, or a the pump quit, Leslie was the guy who had to go out and fix things. It was his grinding, consuming responsibility for ten years or more, and until 1910 it was a mom and pop operation. Once a month either cousin Nora Paulding (until she went away to business school) or friend Bess Cagley would be invited in for dinner, and when the dishes were cleared everyone would go to work on the water bills, Stella excepted. She wasn’t too good with numbers, but she appreciated what Nora and Bess were doing. They both received handsome Christmas presents by way of thanks. A claim has been made on behalf of A. C. Little that he found the creek in Riverdale from which to divert a flow for city use, but there is no showing that this was part of the system that was built after 1905. It consisted of an intake on Butte Creek, piping through a 1,350 foot tunnel under a ridge and then along the bottom of the Willapa River up into a siphon for storage in a concrete tower on the Raymonds’ property on The Island. The route that was laid out was almost a mile closer to the center of town than the alternative later adopted (after a series of engineering studies in the 1920s) of taking water from the South Fork behind the present golf course. Just getting the water into the city wasn’t easy. In one protracted legal battle, Leslie and Stella sued Joanna Shropshire for the rights to put water pipe across her land north of the river. “I saw Mrs. Shropshire today. She is irrepressible. There is little hope of doing business with her,” attorney John O’Phelan wrote the Raymonds on October 12, 1906. The Raymonds won the Shropshire case, won on appeal to the state supreme court, won again in the trial court on a new complaint, and were going through another appeal process when a settlement was reached: They paid her $400 damages and $113 in expenses on Oct. 30, 1909. For several years Leslie dickered with many property owners at both the South Fork and Butte Creek fields, and around 1920 the city considered putting in another tunnel from Butte Creek. In the end, however, officials decided to go with the South Fork for 100 percent of the city’s needs, eliminating underwater pipes for every section of the city except Riverdale. Stella’s diary also indicates that A. C. Little was at one point attempting to start a competing water company, but as far as could be learned, it was never put into operation. However, a salt water system was installed by the city in the very early days to flush garbage and sewage into the river. Leslie was involved in much more than routine maintenance of the water plant. Two projects he worked on during those years can still be viewed. One was the city’s first reservoir, a squat cylindrical concrete tower rising thirty or so feet over, appropriately, Tower Avenue. The other was a six foot high tunnel burrowed 1,350 feet through a ridge along Butte Creek. |
The Raymond water storage tank under construction in 1911. |
Thayer Raymond,
daughter of George and Hannah Raymond, many years later provided the Pacific
County Historical Society with an account of the water tower’s construction.
One big problem was that it was impossible locally to find sand of the
right consistency for the concrete, but when a schooner arrived from Peru
with sand in use as ballast. Leslie made a deal for the ship’s sand
and construction proceeded with a little bit of Latin America securing
Raymond’s water supply.
Leslie was at the tunnel project 57 times in 1908 and 1909 and the first contractor in 1906 quit after getting only ten feet into the side of the hill, but his successor advanced 500 feet in the next four months. Until the Raymonds acquired a horse ( named Billy) Leslie walked more than a mile to the scene, often at night. The horse had been intended for Stella, who sewed herself a “riding skirt,” and then found that Leslie often preempted Billy for his business errands. Autos were useless except on a few city streets. The complaints kept coming. Service interruption. Pump failure. Breaks in the pipes. A veiled threat by the city to install Mayor Little’s competing water system. Harassment by the mills paying for water. Leakage at the dam on the South Fork which had been installed for use as an alternative source. Breakdown of the gasoline engine running the concrete mixer at the reservoir under construction, pressure on the South Fork line goes to 70 pounds. There’s a blowout. A big log drive nearly washes away the pump house. On August 3, 1911 South Fork water is turned on, but eight days later the pumps go out. |
Leslie Raymond's business card. |
|
| Some indication
of the pressure on Leslie Raymond is reflected in a comparison of water
pumped to city users in the year 2000 and that pumped in 1952, as far back
as records are available in the city water department. In 1952, 380
million gallons were pumped; in 2000 only 155 million gallons, a 59 percent
reduction.
By the fall of 1911, Leslie was ready to sell the water company. He added up everything he and Stella had invested in the system. It came to $102,200, and though he had close ties with then Mayor Case, he wasn’t in a good position in 1912 to bargain with his fellow city council members on price, for the state Public Service Commission was investigating the company’s operations. When the commission ordered meters put on the Siler and Willapa Lumber Company, the two companies started a lawsuit, saying they were being deprived of their “valuable property rights.” The public service commission then reopened an earlier case, and the two favored mills stopped paying for their water, suing Leslie and Stella for return of the $3,800 water charges already paid. It was a lawyers bonanza. No wonder the Raymonds wanted to sell out. The issue festered until April, 1913. At the council’s meeting April 1 Leslie resigned and, no longer a member, gave the members his asking price. It was $140,000. Three days later the members came back with their counter offer. It was only $75,000. And there the matter rested for two years. Leslie picked up a surprising ally, sort of, this being Mayor Alexander C. Little, who was back in office but already having trouble with his business supporters as well as the Raymond Herald. In 1914, in the second issue of his new Raymond Review, Little fired off a 2,000 word editorial setting forth his opinion on a wide variety of subjects, including the water system: “The demands of the public on any water company operated by a private corporation are so large that they make it impossible for a plant to maintain itself and pay a fair dividend. The general sentiment throughout the whole country is that the water system of any city should be owned by the municipality. It is then operated only to pay expenses and is not compelled to earn an amount sufficient to pay dividends. For that reason the price of water to consumers may be reduced.” Mayor Little said “the question will soon be before the people” but stopped short of telling the council how to vote. Months later, when purchase of the system came before the city council in early 1915, several members grumbled that the appraised value of the system, approximately $93,000, seemed high, although the Public Service Commission had come up with $130,000 for an appraisal. Mayor Little asked the council what its wishes were, but the members hesitated. They seemed to be waiting to be told what to do, but finally the appraised value of $93,881.52 was agreed upon. The issue was settled at last. Leslie and Stella Raymond were out of the water business, though at a loss if their stated investment in the company was entirely their own money. |
|
| Stewart Holbrook’s portrait of Raymond |
 |
| No one has described Raymond
in those early years better than journalist-author Stewart Holbrook, who
painted this word picture for his “Far Corner,” a fast paced history of
the northwest published in 1952:
“Its business district contained several new concrete buildings, but also block on block of structures straight out of Western or Yukon fiction: false-front establishments, many with fearsome architectural embellishments, called pool rooms, cardrooms, tobacco stores, clothing stores, hotels, rooming houses, sports centers, restaurants, and what not. A big business on Front Street was the retailing of moonshine and homemade beers and wines, all illegal in the days of Prohibition. The upstairs of many of these places were made into rooms for transients, and there was generally believed to be a chambermaid for every room. “The juke box had not penetrated Pacific County, but the electric player piano was well settled, and the insistent beat of a dozen of these hurdy-gurdies made an evening on Front Street memorable, while the tides washed and gurgled underneath the shacks and brought rich aromas to guests and their customers. The Raymond sea gulls never slept. Busy all day, they held convention in the evening, wheeling and darting, screaming high and eerily above the pounding bass of Dardanella, fighting for scraps of food, lighting on window sills to glare at the people inside. “The sidewalks and some of the streets were planks set on stringers supported by piling. At low tide they were about ten feet above water; and during the June and December tides they either sank out of sight or floated off. They rattled and thumped much of the night as lumber carriers moved over them. The town was none too well lighted, but it was never really dark; the hot red eyes of the sawdust burners of the mills blinked, then flared and smoked, twenty-four hours a day. Great seagoing ships steamed in to dock and await cargo. Two railroads shunted cars the night long in order that siding and flooring and shingles might be loaded the next morning. |
 |
“The whole place
was throbbing, fairly bursting with activity and the urgency I came quickly
to associate with pioneering; with pioneering even sixty years after the
covered wagons had ceased to roll. Raymond ... did not remind me
of anything I had known in New England. I found the spirit new and wonderful.”
As the water issue dragged on, Leslie’s real estate business grew, establishing a firmer financial basis that would endure for decades. He successfully promoted The Island as a local counterpart to elegant Nob Hill in San Francisco, and followed up with aggressive (if not wholly successful) marketing of Willavale lots north of the river. Names of two streets there (Howard St. and Gaylord St.) honored his friend Howard Gaylord of Portland. |
The Raymond Building (VFW Building), 3rd and Duryea (recently torn down). PCHS #1994.105.343. |
|
| He built seven commercial
structures. the last of them being a two-story building at Third and Duryea,
sold to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in 1959 and finally razed after being
damaged by the 2001 earthquake. He also built houses and yes, they
must have been rather modest. One bill he paid to Drew and Younglove,
contractors, in 1907, covered “payment in full” for “cottages” in the second
and third additions to Raymond. It was for $758.40, but for how many
structures was not stated.
By 1912, the Raymonds’ credit was improving, but stresses were developing in the city’s dominant clique. A “Mr. Buchanan,” no further identified but doubtless an emissary of someone in authority, had tried to push Leslie off the council in 1910, Stella wrote in her diary. Leslie told him to take a hike and the subject wasn’t mentioned again. |
|
Photos taken by Leslie Raymond of Panama Canal construction (1912). |
Leslie and Stella’s first vacation
The Raymonds had talked about traveling for years, even picking out a preferred stateroom location for a make believe ocean voyage trip, but they took their extended first real life vacation in February, 1912. Leslie had just been discharged from Good Samaritan Hospital in Portland after a major operation to remove an infected appendix. |
| As recounted in Stella’s diary, he began
talking about going to Panama even before his surgery.
At 37, the workaholic Leslie Raymond was worn out. He needed a break and could have been forgiven if he recounted his achievements over the last ten years to Stella, concluding with the declaration that he had now proven himself to her and Mamma Roney and it was time to have some fun. Having organized fun wasn’t all that easy for Leslie. As far as is known, he didn’t hunt or fish, the two sports of choice for most Raymond men. He was a little old for baseball, and never took up golf after the links were built on the South Fork in 1926. Leslie kept up his bicycling, gardened, and went swimming with Stella; that was about it for this quiet loner. Stella’s cousin Arline Robinson agrees with the description of Leslie as a loner “who no one knew very well” but remembers one annual occasion when he seemed to come out of himself. This was the annual Thanksgiving dinner at which he presided for family and friends. “His eyes would just sparkle as he stood up to carve the turkey, and he laughed and joked with everyone,” Arline recalled recently. Leslie was the unchallenged master of his home at these family parties. They must have offered him a cherished emotional fulfillment, just as travel did for both him and Stella. The Raymonds were in such a rush to get started on that first tour of Central America that when they entrained at Portland to board a banana freighter at New Orleans, they had with them the steamer trunk that Stella had confidently packed before his appendix operation. It was not the kind of convalescence you would have expected in those days of primitive surgery, but Leslie wanted to get started and Stella wanted to oblige him. Brother George would be in charge of the real estate business during their absence. Stella’s diary offers no suggestion that she babied him because of his health on the trip, even when their reservations were lost at Matanzas, Cuba, and he had to sit up all night in the hotel lobby. Stella wasn’t impressed with Cuba, which she described in her diary as “uncultivated and uninteresting.” Her diary has relatively little to say about the sights they saw in that nation or any natives they met, but her entries are dotted with the names of dozens of fellow passengers with whom they dined or were paired up with on side trips. The Panama Canal wasn’t opened until August of 1914, but photos in the Raymonds’ album show they saw the famed Culebra Cut, Lake Gatun and huge tubes used to drain the locks. It must have been one of the high points of the trip for a waterworks guy like Leslie. For Stella, the peak might have been her shopping tour of Marshall Field’s in Chicago while he looked over the city waterworks, as he also did in Kansas City and St. Louis. The Raymonds were back home May 4, 1912, after being on the road 72 days, including stops in San Francisco, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, San Antonio, New Orleans, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Panama, Jamaica, Cuba, Key West, Jacksonville, a second stop in New Orleans, Chicago, St. Louis and Kansas City. They did have a problem on the train to Memphis. The conductor told Stella to put away her deck of playing cards as card games were forbidden in Mississippi on Sundays, so they took chairs on the brass railed observation platform and watched the scenery roll by. It’s a compelling image, shining rails leading back to the flat horizon, rich black cotton fields drying under a warm April sky, primitive cabins for the field hands dotting the plantations, the Raymonds watching the world go by from their canvas chairs. Stella wears the pastel shades of a Gibson girl outfit, a wide brimmed straw hat tied beneath her chin, Leslie has on one of his dark, double breasted suits. They are a well-to-do married couple in their late thirties seeing their country and enjoying themselves. It could have been an upbeat cover for the Saturday Evening Post; or a dark scene from a Faulkner novel. |
|
| Wobbly strikers arouse fears in city
The Raymonds arrived home to find there had been a problem while they were gone. Stella referred to it as the International Workers of the World’s “troublous period.” The Wobblies, as they were known, comprised an aggressive left wing labor organization with substantial membership in the timber and lumber industries. People were afraid of the Wobblies, just as they were afraid of foreigners, so when a group of 150 men, some of them Wobblies, others Greeks or Finns, and some who fit both categories, arrived in Raymond in late March, or “descended” into the city in Stella’s words, about 460 men were sworn in as deputy sheriffs to drive them out of town. The sawmills were closed, banker J. J. Haggerty presided at one meeting and Ed Lowe at another. A dozen union members were locked up by Sheriff Stephens. Fifty Finns fled to Nahcotta by boat and 150 Greeks were herded into two boxcars and their local meeting halls boarded up. In the words of the South Bend Journal, “They were packed into the boxcars like sardines in a box.” The idea was for the citizenry to pay the one way fare to Centralia for the Greeks, but the railroad wouldn’t go along, so smoking car and coach accommodations were provided and by the next day all 150 were in Centralia. So was Ed Lowe of Raymond, chairman of the first meeting, and the Greek consul from Tacoma, a Mr. Hans Heiden, to whom the working men gave a “highly colored” version of events in Raymond, according to the Journal. The Greeks hadn’t given up. They decided to return to Raymond by train, and got as far as Willapa before a force of 150 Raymond men headed by A. C. Little halted their progress. With additional instructions from Northern Pacific headquarters, the NP conductor decided to press on. The train chugged ahead to Raymond, but Little and his men wouldn’t let the passengers disembark there, forcing a retreat to Menlo. The riders were placed in a “corral” overnight and returned to Centralia the next day on a special train. “Meanwhile the Greek consul had been met by Mr. Little, who displayed some temper and expressed a desire to fight, but everybody was excited and Mr. Little was no exception,” according to the Journal. In the end, order was restored, blame for the strike was placed on forty striking Greeks who were also Wobblies, and the mill owners paid for a special train back to Tacoma for all concerned, the Journal said. When things quieted down the Greeks discovered that pay in Raymond was higher than elsewhere, the Journal piously reminded its readers. “Family men” were brought into Raymond at higher wages to replace the striking foreigners, the Willapa Harbor Pilot added. How the Raymond Herald covered the events cannot be determined, for all relevant copies of 1912 issues of that newspaper have disappeared. When Willapa Country was being prepared in 1965, its editors were initially reluctant to include an account of the 1912 mill strike “because of so many different variations” in accounts of events. On advice of University of Washington scholars, however, it was decided to include a summary of stories in the Journal and Pilot. In a bitter aftermath to the strike Raymond city officials kept the Finnish People’s Society meeting hall at Seventh and Ellis streets boarded up, leading to protests by Society officials in Seattle and San Francisco. One, Calvin Rutherford, wrote the mayor that he would publicize its “miserable recent history” if the city didn’t reopen the Hall immediately and pay for damages to the property. The papers, uncovered in state archives by researcher Doug Allen, don’t indicate how the matter was settled. Only five years old, the city of Raymond had weathered a serious episode of civil disorder only by strong arm tactics, but bloodshed had been avoided; it was a better resolution than in Centralia where the Armistice Day shootings of 1919 left five dead. A. C. Little had seemed to be spoiling for a fight with the Wobblies, but it was in a cause popular with most Raymond residents fearful of the tough talking union men and foreigners. While Elmer Case was the elected mayor at the time, when Little jumped into the fray he appeared to be the city’s leader. At least two of the denunciatory letters from officials of the Finnish Peoples Society are addressed simply to the “Mayor,” without naming him. The writers may not have known who was really in charge at Raymond. Leslie Raymond was out of town on his extended vacation during the Wobbly episode but was back at his council seat in June of 1912. He presided at four council meetings at the end of the year, probably signifying a close tie with the absent Case. L.V. resigned from the council in March, 1913, because of his pending sale of the water company to the city and never got back into elective politics, but his brother George was appointed to fill an unexpired term on the city council in 1915, an appointment which probably indicated that George was acceptable to both Little and the council majority. However, George was defeated for a full term by Charles Henkle, 117-68. The best politician in the family was undoubtedly George’s wife, Hannah, who ran for the school board in 1915. In a spirited contest with Dr. E. R. Perry, Hannah won 418-348. She had arranged for her supporters to be driven to the polls to vote, while her opponent had simply relied on his “personal popularity,” the Herald explained. |
The thriving metropolis of Raymond, circa 1915. View looking east from above Baleville. PCHS #8-27-80-6 (9) |
| An overcrowded booster bandwagon
Raymond was booming. Promotional literature described it as the “Empire City of Willapa Harbor,” an encomium picked up by Northern Pacific conductors to announce the arrival of three passenger trains a day at the South Fork station. For his first five years as mayor Little coasted along on the booster bandwagon where there was plenty of room aboard for wets, drys, do gooders, churchgoers, tavern owners, businessmen and blue collar working men. An out-of town newspaperman referred to him as “Daddy Little”; A. C. knew he could reclaim the mayor’s chair from Case whenever he wanted to. A. C. had two articulate enemies in South Bend, however. One was Henry Ward Beecher Hewen, a tough talking lawyer who’s most important asset probably was the fact that he had the ear of the other, South Bend Journal publisher Frederick A. Hazeltine, an outspoken prohibitionist. To skeptics, Hewen talked dry but drank wet; to his fans, he believed in everyone’s right to choose. Hazeltine was opposed to drinking, period. A full year before Hewen and Little squared off in the 1912 Republican primary for county prosecutor, Hazeltine published a criticism by a Seattle banker of the allegedly loose control of municipal finance in Raymond. Probably egged on by Ed Connor, publisher of the Willapa Harbor Pilot, the other and more liberal newspaper in South Bend, Little wrote a scorching defense of Raymond’s money management. Little’s punch line was that Hazeltine was a “dirty bird that befouls its own nest,” a bit of homespun vituperation that he must have enjoyed greatly, for the Pilot published it in bold face type and Little used the phrase again several times in later years. Pretty much obscured by Little’s attack was the original charge that Raymond Land and Improvement Company was behind on paying its property taxes, an uncomfortable but not uncommon condition for real estate speculators then and now. In 1926, for instance, the year after Leslie and Stella returned from their trip around the world, their delinquent real estate taxes up for sheriff’s sale that year, plus penalties and interest, came to well over $6,000. Hewen had an equally colorful turn of phrase that was a huge hit, in South Bend at least: “It is of supreme importance to the general interests of Pacific County that the Raymond Land (and Improvement) Company political machine; headquarters in Raymond and hindquarters in South Bend; should be broken at the ensuing election.” Little wasn’t on the primary ballot himself, but he seemed to be supporting both of Hewen’s two opponents for prosecutor, F. D. Couden and John J. O’Phelan, both of South Bend. Little undoubtedly already had county (or statewide) political ambitions and may only have been trying to establish himself as a kingmaker. It is a mystery, however, why he put forth two candidates to divide the anti-Hewen vote, if he really did. It seems likely that Little was simply trying to exploit on a county-wide basis the heroic role he had assumed in Raymond during the Wobbly crisis, but it opened up a character issue which clearly didn’t work for him. His “October surprise” (a smear which comes too late in a political campaign to be effectively answered) cost him dearly. Little chose the last pre-election issue of the Raymond Herald to empty his gun at Hewen, but since few pre-1913 copies of the Herald survive, the reader can only surmise what Little’s charges were by reading Hewen’s answers. The most substantive issue seems to have been a $2,576 property assessment that Raymond Land and Improvement Company satisfied by selling to the city other property assessed at $299 for $2,576. What a coincidence! “When caught with the goods on him Little is trying to escape conviction by claiming that he and his company intend to be honest and return the money,” Hewen wrote in the rebuttal flyer which he managed to get printed and distributed just before election day. Most of his flyer was hot air or character assassination, but it added up to a detailed list of many alleged wrongs and hypocrisies which Little had committed but kept from public view:
In the September primary, Hewen received only 44 percent of the vote, but this was enough to win the GOP nomination. Couden (25 percent) and O’Phelan (31 percent) divided the rest. No Democrats were seeking the office; it was still a Republican era in Pacific County. Hewen’s prosecution of the famed Raymond conspiracy case in 1913 probably cost him support in Raymond. He didn’t bother running for reelection in 1914, the consequence being a tight race won by Couden over O’Phelan, 1282-1270. However, Hewen came back in 1916 to win election as superior court judge, a position he held until his death in 1936. |
| Mill operators’ gambit flops
Little’s watershed year of 1913 began innocuously enough with a meeting of the council January 10 for the ceremonial reading of the election results and handing of the gavel to the new mayor, Little, by the retiring mayor, Case. The Herald summed up Case’s brutally frank valedictory speech: He had wanted another year in office, but one day Little came to see him. “See here, Case,” he said, “you have been in office only a year and you have built yourself one of the finest houses in the city. I held the office for six or seven years and have no home yet. Now if the pickings have been so good in the last year, I would like to have another try at the office.” Case, owner of four shingle mills, said he “hadn’t the heart” to insist on another year as mayor. Little made no rejoinder, but simply took the gavel and blandly continued the meeting. The fat was in the fire. At the April 18 meeting the city council and a surprised Mayor Little were confronted by a delegation of mill operators:
The mill men had a plan: cancel the 16 licenses, which cost the tavern men $1,000 each and issue just three licenses at $5,000 each. The council quickly approved their plan on a 5-2 vote. Members Kilburn and Culver voted against the plan, winning a compliment in the Pilot for having the courage of their convictions. Mayor Little was furious, vowing to submit a written veto immediately and expounding on the treachery of Councilman Stratton. It happened this way, Mayor Little said in a scattershot attack on the mill owners. Leslie Raymond had resigned because of the water negotiations and recommended Stratton as his replacement. He had made the appointment, and the council had confirmed it. But then Stratton voted with the majority to create a veto-proof bloc for the new tavern licensing plan. Little didn’t blame L. V. though. Raymond was “absolutely independent” of the council majority’s control. All this was in a letter to “the citizens of Raymond,” though how distributed, it is not known. The mayor blamed the “pampered son of a rich father” for getting the tavern ordinances prepared secretly in Portland, egged on by Elmer Case who was frustrated because he had been unable to obtain campaign contributions from the tavern owners for Stratton, an unsuccessful candidate for sheriff. Little added irrelevantly that the mill cabal had hornswoggled Leslie and Stella out of a good profit on property which became the site of the Milwaukee Railroad terminal. Even worse in Little’s formulation, were the cabal’s tactics in selling needed right of way into the city to the railroad for $250,000, much more than the land was worth. What did Leslie and Stella Raymond have to do with this struggle? A great deal, possibly. Though out of active politics, L. V. could still pull strings behind the scenes and most likely knew of the mill owners’ cabal. He may well have obtained Stratton’s agreement to go along with it before recommending his appointment to the council. So even though Little probably suspected that Raymond had sandbagged him, L. V.’s stature in the community was so large; and so clean; that Little, couldn’t risk alienating him. L. V. was on the side of the angels. A. C. wanted to be thought of as his pal. Naturally, the two contentious South Bend newspapers jumped into the fray. To get the mill operators’ side you read the Journal; to get Little’s side, you read the Pilot. It was a wild free-for-all. “That something of the sort was going to drop soon the saloons should have known as the wide open plan was getting too raw,” the Journal wrote. Things were particularly bad since city councilman P. W. Culver took over as Raymond deputy sheriff. His appointment seemed to be taken as “a sign of welcome to all undesirables.” Little put out another flyer outlining his position and hired a hall where he spoke to a “bedlam of cheers,” according to the Pilot. He admitted he wasn’t much of a businessman, but said he knew what was best for the community. It wasn’t just a matter of morality; business considerations were involved as well. He expounded at length on damage to the city if the saloons were closed on Sunday. There would be job losses for the mill workers if their bosses’ plan went through. The workers would be driven out of town and replaced by Asians. |
| The timid Raymond Herald
could only offer an editorial stating South Bend wasn’t all that pure either
and those two South Bend newspapers should keep their noses out of Raymond’s
business. Otherwise, the Herald pretended the whole ugly affair
wasn’t happening.
In the end, the struggle turned out to be a humiliating defeat for the mill operators. They learned that they no longer could control either A. C. Little or the city council, which backed almost all the way down. It finally passed an ordinance to restrict the number of licensees to ten, charge them an annual fee of $1,500 and require them to close from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. Little said he was still unhappy, but in the end he didn’t veto the measure. The Pilot gloated, “Raymond council wilts under fir, Harmony again reigns in hustling, bustling Raymond.” Little had won a pyrrhic victory, though. He had cast off his establishment shackles, but at a cost. The businessmen would be biding their time. By the summer of 1913 Raymond was coping with another hot issue: Had the city attorney and others conspired to bribe a witness in the J. W. Coleman case? Mr. Coleman, a visitor from Doty, had stopped by Maggie Rose’s whorehouse on First Street, asked to visit his old friend Eva, and left peaceably when he learned she had stepped out. Okay so far, but unfortunately, he fell on the plank sidewalk, broke an arm, and, of course, sued the city for $10,000. Since the issue of how drunk Coleman was would go far to decide the city’s liability, a group of city aides decided to strengthen one witness’s spine with a $50 sweetener. Unfortunately, as they discussed this gambit in the office of city attorney Martin Welsh, others had their ears on a listening device in the next room. Mayor Little’s loyal city councilman (and Deputy Sheriff) P. W. Culver was found not guilty of conspiracy but Welsh and a grocer J. W. Jackson were found guilty and sentenced to the state prison. The prosecuting attorney, as you can imagine, was H. W. B. Hewen of South Bend. It all made for good copy in the newspapers, but the state supreme court ordered a retrial, citing prejudice by trial Judge Wright against the defendants. For one thing, the judge had refused to let Martin Welsh’s brother, attorney John T. Welsh, introduce testimony that Maggie Rose ran a house of prostitution and thus could not be trusted to tell the truth. A woman’s reputation for truthfulness could not survive a life of immorality, the Supreme Court opined. Then there was the deposition of Ms. Rose taken by the defense down in Portland. Judge Wright had cross-examined the court reporter in open court, apparently suggesting that her transcription of Ms. Rose’s answers was inaccurate. Hewen, by 1915 no longer county prosecutor, was appointed special prosecutor for the retrial but the case was dropped when the county commissioners wouldn’t appropriate funds to bring in out-of-state witnesses for Hewen, who thereupon resigned. It was another close call for A. C. Little, who must have felt a sense of foreboding when he wrote these lines for the second issue of his short lived Raymond Review in 1914: Our little city is at the parting of the ways. Either we must develop our many resources and take our position among the leading cities or soon lose our excellent standing and sooner or later be passed by other cities more determined and more aggressive. The editor of the Review has made an exhaustive study of city building during the last six years, and feels competent to speak on all questions, which relate to the material development of our community, and we shall do so in no uncertain tone.On September 11, 1914, the Pilot reported that Mayor Little had been unable to attend the annual Labor Day celebration because he was “very ill.” He defeated M. A. Hoaglund in the primary for another one-year term, but in the election that November statewide prohibition was passed, effective January 1, 1916, with the drys winning, 790-369 in Pacific County. There were loopholes, of course. Drug stores were allowed to sell alcoholic beverages “for medicinal purposes” and Washingtonians would be allowed to buy twelve quarts of beer and a half gallon of liquor once every 20 days if these beverages were “sold from without the state,” i.e., invoiced by an out-of-state dealer. It was a blow at Mayor Little’s political base, the city’s blue collar workers and the taverns they patronized, and in the summer of 1915, G. O. Todd announced he would close his tavern in August rather than pay the $1,500 license renewal. He would be forced to shut down December 31 anyway. There had been 15 taverns open in the city a year ago; now only eight were left. Another of Little’s enthusiasms, oil and gas exploration, had a brief revival in 1914. That summer gas was observed bubbling up from the slough at Third and Duryea, and he was able to capture a small amount, which was sent to a laboratory in Tacoma to be tested. The results were better than expected. A showman to the end, Little brought a “regular Welsbach burner” to the city council meeting for a demonstration. “The gas burned with a clear and steady flame, which is convincing proof of its commercial value if it can be secured in sufficient quantities,” the Herald wrote July 10, 1914. Alas, very little gas could be found, so the “keen interest” of residents turned to the Willapa Oil Company, which had been organized by Leslie Raymond’s old friend, H. J. Kettner. “Prospects for oil are very bright,” headlined the Herald on November 13, 1914, and in the first issue of the New Year Mr. Kettner offered locals one last chance to get in on the stock offering at $2.50 per share. A month later drilling was suspended and Mayor Little had to explain to a crowded meeting of stockholders that the company had failed because of “mismanagement.” |
| Little ousted in referendum
As more and more stress showed up in A. C. Little’s personal dominance of Raymond politics, his opponents, the lumber operators, had problems, too. Fifteen companies announced February 20, 1914, in the Herald that they would stand pat on a 10-hour day policy with an open shop, rejecting the demand of the workers for an eight-hour day, the same demand made two years earlier by the International Workers of the World. The mills refused to “unionize” their operations, by which they presumably meant accept a closed shop. The demands may have been a reflection on the accuracy of a glowing Herald story October 21, 1913, about conditions in the logging camps. Much better, since a recent investigation by the YMCA, the newspaper stated. “More employers are coming to realize the personal equisition (sic) in their relationship with their men. After a man has worked all day in a steady cold rain in the woods, it is a mighty fine thing to go to a well furnished bunk house and after changing clothes and eating supper to stretch out by a roaring fire and after resting awhile to crawl between two clean sheets the same as he would do at home. What a difference from the old way of not even taking his clothes off for days at a time.” “In the last five years electricity, bathing facilities, a barber shop, pool, recreation and reading rooms have become common; The YMCA as a factor in this uplift movement has contributed its full share,” according to the newspaper. But the improvements in both pay and working conditions were not coming fast enough for the working men, and the Shingle Weavers and Timber Workers Union went on strike July 18, 1917, along with woods and mill workers throughout the northwest. On Willapa Harbor the strikers had the ardent support of Mayor Little and the Pilot. When the Mayor spoke to the strikers for two hours (from a manuscript, the Pilot said) at a meeting in the Eagles Annex, every word was printed in the Pilot, filling two pages of the August 17 issue. A court reporter went along to make sure the newspaper account was faithful to the spoken words, editor Connor assured his readers. Pay of $1.75 per day wasn’t enough, Little said, though not claiming all the 1,500 mill workers were being paid at that low rate. His demand was that the pay be set at a minimum of $3.00 for an eight-hour day, and with World War I underway, he played the patriotism theme. Employers who paid less were “unworthy of consideration as good Americans,” he said. According to “The Forested Land, a History of Lumbering in Western Washington,” published by the University of Washington Press, hard liners among the mill owners initially resisted a proposal for the eight-hour day. More moderate operators realized this would cost them very little, since the days were so short in winter. It took intervention by the commander of the Army’s “spruce division” which had been mobilized to cut timber for military aircraft, to settle the issue. Some operators grumbled that when the war was over they might have to go back to ten-hour, or even twelve hour, days. “Some sort of compromise on the part of the workers is looked for next week,” the Pilot admitted Sept. 7, and a week later three mills were operating again on Willapa Harbor and the same paper conceded that “every week seems to make in look less encouraging” for the strikers. What cash pay increases, if any, were given the workers isn’t clear in published accounts of the strike, but “The Forested Land” concludes that the Wobblies lost ground and the AF of L gained strength during the strike. A. C. Little may have known the employers had already come up with a new plan for his ouster when he made his August 17 speech, or they may have come up with it in response to the speech. In any event, the breach between Little and the Raymond business community was final, and just as bad for him, the tavern owners’ political muscle was gone. He pinned his hopes on the timber workers. The first step in the mill owners’ plan was a referendum for a change in the city’s government from a mayor-council of seven to a commission with just three members, including a mayor. This was set for December 21, with the second vote in February 1918, on three commission members if the first was successful. Little would be out of a job if the first commission plan was adopted, but could take his chances in the second election. |
| The businessmen, campaigning
under the banner of the Greater Raymond Club, didn’t identify themselves
in an ad they ran in the Herald just before the referendum.
They denied they were opposed to organized labor, stating they were simply
trying to reduce the expense of municipal government, a recurring theme
in Raymond politicking, and lighten the city’s debt burden. They
sought the support of merchants, business and professional people, salaried
employees, “and especially the members of organized labor,”
Mayor Little answered the GRC in another talk at the Eagles Annex about a month before the December 21 referendum election. The commission government movement was simply directed at him and the union members of the council, he said, and admitted “the failure of the city to realize on what its founder (himself, presumably) dreamed it to be.” Cities run by commissions (such as Tacoma and Seattle), initiatives, referendums; these were all impractical ideas of dreamers and faddists. The Herald knew where its bread was buttered, though. Atop page one of its Christmas issue a streamer headline reminded voters: “JUST THINK! 113 cities in the United States have adopted the Commission Form of Government in the last eleven months.” The election wasn’t really close, going 576-392 for the commission, or 59.5 to 40.5 percent. Little knew he was beaten and didn’t bother to seek election to the new commission in the February balloting which saw Edward C. Lawler, associated with the Willapa Boiler Works, elected mayor and E. E. Colkett and J. T. Stratton chosen commissioners. The business establishment had been restored to power. A. C. Litttle had overestimated the union voting strength and underestimated opposition to his wide-open policy on saloons and prostitution. At age 59, his political career was over. Despite the Greater Raymond Club’s prim talk of fiscal responsibility, it is difficult to think of the 1918 change to a commission form of government as anything but a successful move to oust Mayor Little, just as he had charged. Ironically, eighty years later the council form was reinstituted in Raymond, again ousting the incumbent mayor, this time in mid-term. The Herald had plenty to say about the change in 1917. It was pleased, of course. “To the Greater Raymond Club belongs the credit for interesting our people in the commission plan, and causing them to study up on the question. Almost invariably the more a man or woman studied the plan the more they became favorable to it,” concluded a story on the voting December 28. Little didn’t bother to come to the January council meeting at which the results were read, or to the February meeting, which saw the end of his nine years and five months as mayor. As far as the council minutes go, no one had anything nice to say about him at that last meeting, but the Herald gave him quite a send off: Headlines: Mayor Little leaves city - Man who built the town - most prominent character in all southwest Washington during past dozen years - Goes to Yelm prairie where he has interests that require all his personal attention. Story: Hon. A. C. Little has moved his household goods to Yelm, Washington, this week and will bid adieu to this city which owes so much to his genius as a town builder, and will cast his lot with the town of Yelm, where he has extensive interests - For the past year or more he has been suffering from stomach trouble and has not been able to put the vim and energy into his local business affairs as he formerly did - The mayor finds his health is much better at Yelm - A. C. Little is a strong character. He knows how to deal heavy blows, and to take them with fortitude from his enemies. He was trained in the old school of political fighters, who are always surrounded by the warmest admirers and most devoted friends, and are always sure to arouse bitter enmities. Little and his wife Jennie didn’t stay long in Yelm, for when he died April 29, 1932 at his home in Van Nuys, CA, at the age of 73 his death certificate said he had been in California 14 years, in Van Nuys for five years and lived with his wife at 6960 Hazleton Street sixteen miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles. Little’s occupation was described as contractor and the certificate of death listed its cause as senility, arteriosclerosis and cerebral hemorrhage. The “date of onset” is difficult to read and could be either 1920 or 1930. His body was buried at Valhalla Cemetery. Speculation that Little suffered from emotional problems and may have had a nervous breakdown about 1914 could not be substantiated for this paper. He was reported in the press to be “very ill” that year, but with what ailment was not even hinted at in the newspapers. So too, the stomach problems noted when he left Raymond in 1918 were never more fully described. A case could certainly be made, however, that his fiery, messianic personality shared the blame for his disputes with business interests in the city, and thus contributed to his downfall. Frustration at his inability to amass the riches he saw flowing to his business acquaintances may have also played a role in his decline. His portfolio of worthless stocks indicates he suffered reverses before he relocated in Raymond, and one investment, Commercial Trout Company, was described by Journal editor Hazeltine as simply a “fake.” Articles of incorporation for this company indicate it sought water rights for Sultan in Snohomish County, build an electric power plant, establish saw and shingle mills, lay out a town site, buy timberlands, conduct a retail and wholesale fish business and, finally, “artificially propagate fish of all kinds.” J. B. Duryea was listed as a fellow incorporator with Little, as he was in Little’s initial promotional efforts in Raymond. The Sultan papers were filed with the Secretary of State on June 13, 1902, just six months before Little turned his attention to similar plans for Raymond. Other companies Little organized included the Golden Wizard Mining Company (Baker County, OR, 1901) and Iconoclast Gold and Copper Mining Company (Keller, Ferry County, WA, 1899). Little’s first venture in Raymond, West Coast Veneer Co., went into receivership and he seems to have had no further association with it after reorganization. He was initially listed as “Manager” on the roster of Raymond Land and Improvement, was advanced to Secretary-Treasurer in the 1914-15 city directory, but was no longer with RL&I when the 1915-16 directory came out. |
| In 1915-16 he and his wife Jennie
were shown to be living at 317 Second St. and he was president and city
attorney Martin Welsh was secretary of State Lumber and Box Company, Ninth
and Heath streets. Both were trustees of Willapa Harbor Sand and
Gravel Company.
Another Little investment in the Harbor area was the Raymond Review, which he apparently established in 1914 to give himself a better break in news coverage than he was getting in the Raymond Herald. It was a curious move, since the Willapa Harbor Pilot was already Little’s cheerleader. The Review lasted only a few months. Piecing together Little’s life from what he told people, his death certificate, his obituaries in the Herald and the Raymond Advertiser, and information in the files of the Nebraska State Genealogical Society, the best guess is that he was born in Charles City, IA, in 1858, the son of William and Emeline Little, and as an infant moved ten miles west to the smaller community of Rockford, IA. The family soon moved west again to a farm in Filmore County, NE, and on March 23, 1883, when Little was 24 he married Luella D. Crouch, age 16. The ceremony was conducted at Crete, NE, the seat of Saline County. Alexander C. Little was the grandson of John and Nancy Rae Little, who migrated from Scotland to upstate New York in the 1830s, and thence to Kane County, IL. He was named after his uncle, Alexander C. Little, who turned out to be a worthy honoree. After studying medicine in Keokuk, IA, the first A. C. joined the Union army early in the civil war, was recognized for his gallantry in action during Sherman’s march through Georgia, and was discharged as a captain. He returned to Illinois, studied law at Antioch College and practiced in Aurora before being elected mayor of that city in 1874. The second A. C. Little’s early career, from his first marriage to Ella Crouch in 1883 to his election as mayor of Aberdeen in late 1893, is something of a mystery. He may have spent a part of that period in the gold mining camps at Sumpter in northeast Oregon, where the grocery company sued him for allegedly not paying a $139 grocery bill incurred by Ella. |
A. C. Little died in this house in Van Nuys, CA, in 1932. They may have become homeowners, a goal he had never achieved in Raymond. Photo by Greta Hitz. |
Ella Little died in Seattle in 1952; when, where and on what grounds she and A. C. were divorced was not learned. The dissolution could hardly have been amicable. Pacific County Superior Court records show three suits on promissory notes by Ella Little against A.C. while her ex was mayor. The total involved was $350 and there is no clear indication she collected anything. |
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Records in Yelm indicate A. C. Little’s “extensive interests” there were probably related to a Nisqually River irrigation project with which his brother Charles was associated. The project was approved by voters in 1915 and operated until 1950. A. C. Little’s survivors reported by the Advertiser were his wife Jennie, whom he married January 1, 1904, in South Bend; three sons and a daughter by his first wife, D. A. Little of New York, Edward E. Little and Charles A. Little, both of Tacoma, and Mrs. Eugene Meacham of Washington, D. C. and two brothers, John of Nebraska and Charles of Olympia. One of the most intriguing ties in Little’s colorful life was related in the Advertiser obituary: “During his early years in the Midwest Little was a close friend of William Jennings Bryan.” Since Bryan practiced law in Jacksonville, IL, until 1887 and was elected to Congress from Lincoln, NE, in 1890, they probably knew each other in rural Nebraska during the intervening three-year period. A “political” biography of Bryan’s early years in Nebraska contains no reference to Little, however. Bryan did make a Chautauqua presentation in Raymond, but not until the summer of 1918, after Little left town. Little and Bryan were both known as great orators, but Little began (in Raymond) as a booster and in his fifties moved to the left, while Bryan began as a left wing populist but at the end of his life was renowned for his fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible. Little got no further in elective politics than the local level, while Bryan won the Democratic Party nomination for the presidency three times. Seventy years after Little’s death, he was not yet free of the mystery that had marked his career. While a copy of his death certificate obtained for this paper placed his residence at 6960 Hazelton Street in Van Nuys, CA, inquiry at the local library revealed no such street had ever existed. A photographer for this paper was able, however, to find the white stucco cottage where A. C. lived and died. Its address is 6960 Hazeltine Avenue, a change in spelling of the last syllable that could only have been A. C.’s final defiance of F. A. Hazeltine, his implacable foe during the Willapa years. |
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Stella Raymond car camping in 1916. From album PCHS #6-7-64. |
The “supreme event of our lives”
The Raymonds’ lives turned out much differently than A. C.’s. Both Leslie and Stella were reasonably healthy and active participants in community affairs until well into their eighties, and remained until a few months before their deaths in their rambling, often remodeled home atop The Island. |
| They also had two
vacation cottages, one (the “Stella”) in Seaview and the other (plus two
retired Aberdeen street cars to accommodate visitors) at their cranberry
bog in Grayland. Guest registries during the years 1935-1950 show
a steady stream of visitors, several hundred in all, and include one jovial
comparison of the comforts of “cars 14 and 15” with the appointments available
in Pullman sleeping cars.
Ironically, Reseda, CA, the San Fernando Valley community where the Raymonds wintered but apparently did not own property is only five miles from Van Nuys, where A. C. Little lived at his death. As the Raymonds’ friend, Ray Meredith, remembers it, his parents, Clarke and Frances Meredith, did not begin their trips to Reseda with the Raymonds until well after 1932, when Little died. Among the most frequent guests at the Raymond cottages were John and Lillian Weir. He was a civil engineer; they had come down from Seattle well before World War II when a dam on the North River was in the works, and left for jobs in Fairbanks, Alaska at the start of the war. The Weirs returned to Raymond in about 1946 when he was appointed city engineer, probably at L. V.’s behest. The Weirs home on Tower Avenue was only yards from the Raymonds’. In 1916 the Raymonds somehow managed to motor all the way across the United States on primitive roads and most of the way back, but this was just a warm up for an 11-month round-the-world trip in 1924 and 1925. Their circumnavigation wasn’t done on a posh ocean liner with everything arranged for them at a few choice tourist ports. Leslie and Stella went everywhere, and may have based their itinerary on a popular travel guide, “Vagabond Journey Around the World,” they had read together back in 1913. As friends entertained them at a round of farewell parties, Stella wrote in her diary on September 7, 1924, “We are in the last throes of preparation for the supreme event of our lives, a trip around the world.” They sailed for Honolulu from San Francisco October 1, 1924, on the famed S. S. Matsonia, but virtually all of their water travel was done on a series of smaller Dollar Line steamers, American flagships that carried freight as well as passengers. On land, they crisscrossed Asia and Europe in first and second-class railway coaches, buses, ferries, taxis, funiculars, and jitneys. They stayed at good hotels, but few which would be rated four star. Stella’s journal offers little criticism of their accommodations; she and Leslie weren’t the complaining sort. Rosters preserved in Stella’s scrapbook show they were among about 200 passengers on the Matsonia, but only 72 on the President Garfield, 100 on the President Adams, and 55 on the President Monroe. Stella saved many menus and kept one from the Adams that made light of mal de mer, an occasional problem for both the Raymonds. Their “Hard Ups Dinner” featured Who Said Fish, Weather Cock Dressed and Disguised, and Sour Milk Made Hard. Stella’s scrapbook provides a marvelous mélange of their travels - sightseeing brochures, local maps, hotel bills, railway tickets, snapshots, medical prescriptions, and bills for clothes, rugs and objects of art they bought along the way. One of their many, many photos shows Leslie and Stella in beach attire on Waikiki (her best swimming ever, she wrote), but not all the photo ops worked out. Leslie’s mount moved too quickly for his ride on an Indian elephant to be preserved on film. When the huge beast took a couple of steps, its handler was so upset that he took a bite out of the animal’s ear. Order was quickly restored, but Stella didn’t approve of the corporal punishment that had been administered. Shopping was a major part of their sightseeing, and they bought everywhere. Lace in Ypres, a Persian carpet and gold jewelry in Jaipur, a nine by twelve rug in Shanghai, curtains and tablecloths in Agra, a tin of coffee in Rangoon, a new pair of glasses for Leslie in Nice, a knitted two piece ladies suit (18 pounds) in London and a gown (880 francs) in Paris. Stella pasted in the scrapbook their hotel bills from such elegant hostelries as the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, Raffles in Singapore, the Grand in Budapest, the Regent Palace on Piccadilly Circus in London (16 shillings, 6 pence a night), and the Taj Mahal in Bombay, where they had their choice of porridge, haddock, poached eggs on toast, chicken giblets, mashed potatoes, cold meat, mince pie, assorted jams and marmalade, fruits, tea and coffee for breakfast on December 29, 1924, their 27th wedding anniversary. |
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Leslie was ill in the hotel
room with a temperature, which had shot up to 103, but he was able to get
down a soft-boiled egg in the room that night. Stella jotted down
that the hotel doctor charged them 100 rupees to treat him and a nurse
40 rupees to sit up with him the previous night.
There were problems, of course, other illnesses (not all of them minor), a typhoon in the South China Sea that broke windows and washed away a staircase on the S.S. President Adams, disputes with drivers, missed connections and the like, but that was to be expected. It was the grandest of tours. |
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| In Egypt, they saw
the pyramids, the site of King Tut’s tomb, the Temple of Luxor and Cairo,
a busy commercial city where they were happily surprised to learn English
was in use by many educated persons.
In one of Stella’s dispatches back to the Herald in Raymond she touched on the religious conflict in Palestine, describing the struggle for control of the territory then under British mandate. She and Leslie had a letter of introduction from Fred Dracobly, a friend at home, to his cousin in Cairo, Neguib Mitri Dracobly, who welcomed the Raymonds and offered them cafe Turc and cigarettes. They apparently didn’t talk politics with Dracobly, but in Jerusalem found members of the European colony sympathetic to the impoverished Moslems and fearful that the country would be ruled by Jews. |
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On the train back to Cairo the next day they heard the other side from a young Jewish woman from New York who was teaching in Jerusalem. She pointed out to them scientific land cultivation and “new Jewish colonies with fine modern homes” which she compared to the “primitive abodes and wretched methods of the native Moslem farmers.” | ||
| The young woman was confident that members
of her faith would eventually control Palestine.
Stella didn’t identify the woman, but kept her business card and pasted it in the scrapbook. Her name was Dora Askowith, a graduate of Barnard College at Columbia University then teaching at Hunter College in New York. Ms. Askowith was later recognized as a noted scholar; she published three books, including “The Toleration and Persecution of Jews in the Roman Empire,” undoubtedly the “very formidable book on Jewish history” that Stella saw on the train. Italy was a dazzling succession of ocean and mountain vistas, tours of the antiquities and opera, as Stella indulged her taste for good music. Their first opera was “Rigoletto” at Naples, but it came at the end of a long day of sightseeing and they were exhausted. As Stella told the story: “The only trouble was that the seats were so comfortable and we were so tired that I must confess we all napped at intervals. Once I was awakened by a familiar sound. I said to Mr. Green, ‘Is that Mr. Raymond?’ ‘Yes,’ he answered.Then there was the mix-up at the box office in Rome when Leslie went there to pick up tickets for a performance of “Aida.” Leslie thought he heard the clerk reply, “First half,” meaning matinee, but what he actually received were two tickets to “Falstaff.” Stella was later able to overcome the language problem and they saw “Aida” that evening. They also saw “The Cavalier of Ekebu” at the famed La Scala opera house in Milan, with Toscanini conducting. Stella was disappointed, however. She would have understood the story line if it had been sung in French, but the performance was in Italian. In Venice the Raymonds floated down the Grand Canal and walked across the Bridge of Sighs. Leslie went out sightseeing one afternoon while Stella stayed in their hotel room to work on her journals. And then a guitarist appeared on the plaza below to serenade her. “Leslie is in a mellow mood,” Stella wrote after he brought back an amber bead necklace for her. Stella thought the music and necklace were his way of saying thank you for going along with him on a side trip. Leslie was determined to see Constantinople. The Raymonds became bystanders the next day in a high stakes con game, which fascinated Stella. Their traveling companions the Anners had made new friends at the hotel, a Mr. Adams of Columbus, Ohio, and a Mr. Lavery, who identified himself as a stockbroker. The Anners decided to “play the market” with the newcomers at a bucket shop, a notorious method of gambling on security prices popular in the twenties but long ago outlawed in the United States. Mr. Lavery knew someone who could take their bets on the phone. He, Mr. Anner and Mr. Adams played the market all day as Stella and Leslie listened in on the conversation. It went beautifully and at the end of the afternoon, Mr. Lavery was ahead $37,000, Mr. Anner $5,000, and Mr. Adams $8,000. But there was a problem. The bank was closed. They would have to put all their money together in a bag which Mr. Lavery would guard overnight and take to the bank the next morning to exchange for checks payable to each winner. At this point Mr. Anner fortunately came out of the ether and took his original stake of $5,000 back to his hotel room, where he slept fitfully with the money under his pillow before taking the cash back to the bank the next day. |
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The Raymond's room at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo cost 16 yen for their one night stay; the daily tariff at the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay was 30 rupees. |
Leslie and Stella had cruised
half way around the world with the Greens and Anners, drawn together because
all three couples were in the real estate business. After three months,
however, the friendships were unraveling. Stella described the situation
in a rambling epic poem composed in the Raymonds’ cabin during the twelve
day ocean voyage from Columbo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) across the Indian
Ocean and up the Red Sea to Port Said on the Mediterranean. After
27 rhymed couplets describing the sights they had seen she added:
Mr. Anner of Chicago one must call a little plump, |
| It was a touching
acknowledgement that despite all the sightseeing and shipboard conviviality,
Stella and Leslie came across as simpler, less sophisticated people than
their constant companions, who had decided to say farewell to the Raymonds
in Venice and head directly to London as a foursome.
At the end of their voyage through the Aegean Sea, the Raymonds saw a brawl erupt on the mole at Piraeus among a group of men waiting for places on the overcrowded launch, which would take them to a steamship in the harbor. The violence was a raw, cruel side of life Stella had never seen before, and it seemed to excite her, just as the attempted bucket shop swindle in Venice had. She watched in fascination as one of the men was beaten to a pulp, and described the incident in detail in her journal. Once the Raymonds were truly on their own, they seemed to blossom as they toured Greece, saw Constantinople, Budapest, Vienna and Munich. Most of their sightseeing would register well up in any cultural scale, but in Vienna they boarded a street car to an amusement park for a ride on a Ferris Wheel that had built for the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. The huge wheel was to prove its durability for it was still in service in 1948, when it was used as the scary backdrop for a confrontation between Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten in a renowned movie mystery, “The Third Man.” Leslie and Stella rode the Orient Express (and grumbled about tasteless food at the rest stops), boated down the Rhine to Brussels and Amsterdam, and crossed the Channel so see London and southeast England. And all this before the climax of their grandest of tours, three and a half weeks in France, where Stella’s fluency with the language made a real difference. Her daily journal entries took on a new bite. In Vienna she wrote, “My big legs and feet seem quite at home among these stocky women, and they do run to fat. No wonder Rubens’ women look like Percherons.” In Zurich she commented that the Swiss “treat their cows as badly as they treat their women.” Leslie eventually got even for the opera binge in Italy. In London they saw “Rose Marie,” a Hammerstein and Harbach musical about the Canadian Mounties which Nelson Eddy and Jeanette McDonald brought to the American screen ten years later. Leslie surely would be forgiven if, when the talkie opened at the Raymond Theater, he just happened to mention at Rotary that he and Stella had seen the stage version in London back in 1925. ”Bea Lillie had a small part. She’s a big star now. Good strong voice, but we had trouble with the accent.” Stella held her emotions well in check throughout her long life, and her reaction May 15 to sad news from home was remarkably controlled. She and Leslie had just arrived from London at their hotel in Paris. “I was tired and Leslie went to American Express for the mail. The first letter he opened contained the news of mother’s death. News we read later told of her illness and her funeral. Doctor Gosnell was down, Frank Peterson and Mr. Gana. Hannah also wrote of Thayer’s troubles. Wrote to Hannah, Tom and Bess and Miss Cotter. Leslie sent cable to Geo. in cipher that we had heard about mother and to do as he thought best about meeting us in New York.” Life must go on. Though sudden, Lucy’s death hadn’t been a complete surprise. Before they left home, Stella had written in her diary, “Mama doesn’t realize we’re going; She will probably outlive us all as she is well enough physically. Tom is a saint if there ever was one.” |
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| Paris was a dizzying three weeks
of museums, sightseeing, art galleries (yes, of course they saw the Mona
Lisa at the Louvre), shopping and an outing at the Longchamps racecourse.
There Leslie struck up a conversation with an American woman sitting
next to them, a Mrs. Tirrell from Brooklyn, NY. Stella wasn’t betting,
so Leslie and Mrs. Tirrell decided to team up for a 40 franc bet on Rosemont
in the third race. Rosemont came in dead last, so they made a 50
franc bet on the next race and lost again.
Everyone was having so much fun, though, that Mrs. Tirrell joined the Raymonds on the bus back to the city, and had dinner with them at the hotel. By then it was nine o’clock and when she decided to get a room at the hotel, it was beginning to sound like something out of Hemingway. The hotel was booked up, however, and so Mrs. Tirrell walked through the lobby and out of the Raymonds’ lives. Leslie had survived a brief, chaste flirtation. After four days of touring the chateau country, Stella had to admit that her feet hurt, but she had been dazzled by the antique furniture, the tapestries, the classic lines of the homes, the draperies, the Spanish tile floors; and the Dominion Hotel in Avignon was the best they had stayed in. She confessed to her diary: “I think for me my castle in Spain will always be a chateau in France.” a delightful allusion to Chaucer’s translation from the French half a millennium earlier. Stella was a small town girl whose big league erudition left the Greens and Anners in the dust. Leslie seemed to be regaining the independence he had shown early in the trip, when in Hawaii he did an overnighter by himself to see Kileuea volcano on the Big Island, and braved the Japanese railroad system alone for a day trip from Tokyo. His tongue was sharper, too, for when Stella came back to the hotel in Marseilles from her umpteenth shopping trip and handed him a present, he opened the package to find only a white belt. “Small favors gratefully received,” was all he could say. They boarded another Dollar Line ship in Marseilles on June 16, glided by Gibraltar the next day, were slowed by fog on the Grand Banks, and on June 29 docked in Boston. George, Hannah and Thayer were there to meet them and begin an auto trip back to the west coast. Stella’s journal follows them home, over to western Massachusetts to see their Raymond relatives, down the Hudson valley to visit the Pauldings, to New York City for, yes, more shopping, on to Philadelphia to see the hit musical “No, No Nanette,” thence to Atlantic City for the sights, and west to Gettysburg on July 13 to see the Civil War battlefield. It is in Gettysburg that we lose the Raymonds’ trail. They were making overnight stops in roadside campgrounds, and Stella probably was finding it impossible to keep up with her journal entries. Even if they eschewed any more shopping stops, it was probably early August before they reached Raymond, for in 1925 it was still slow going on intercity roads and stops for auto repairs were frequent. |
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| Thoreau Raymond felt the fact
that Leslie and Stella never had any children was a source of great regret
to him. She remembered a photo of Leslie sitting with an 11-year-old
cousin on his lap. “They both look very happy. You can see
he’s just delighted, and the girl, she’s very happy, but I think she can’t
quite understand all the loving attention paid to her by this visiting
cousin.”
When Ken Grimm, just getting started as a grocer on First Street, admired a mantel clock he saw in Leslie’s office storeroom, Leslie insisted he take it as a gift. Grimm did, and it is still in the family. Another neighbor, Claude House, Jr., lived near the Raymonds as a boy. He recalls L. V. as a good-natured neighbor, but one who watched his money. “He wasn’t passing out popcorn at baseball games. He saved his money. I remember being in their house when I was a kid. It was really impressive. He always wore a suit and wire-rimmed glasses. And he always wore a hat.” When Leslie, by then more than 80, got his car stuck in his driveway, neighbor Everett Blake came to the rescue by maneuvering the car back onto the roadway, up the rise and into the garage. It was nice of him to do it, but the kind of thing Everett and Irene would never forget was that when Everett’s parents observed their 50th anniversary, the Raymonds came to the reception. Tom Roney came to live with Leslie and Stella in his last years, and died in 1938. Niece Thayer Raymond, her brief marriage terminated, moved to Tacoma to teach grade school, but was back in Raymond living in her parents’ house on Duryea Street when Leslie and Stella died. Her mother Hannah and her father George both died in 1954, but almost until the parents’ deaths Thayer accompanied them on visits to Leslie and Stella’s two retreats, the beach house in Seaview and the house near Grayland. Leslie and Stella took no more big trips, possibly because they were getting along in years, possibly because they were in Ray Meredith’s words “land poor” during the 1930s; or possibly because they had already been everywhere. For whatever reason, the two nearby cottages became the focus of their entertaining until age sapped the energy they gave to this important part of their lives. |
The cottage at Seaview |
Everyone who came to the Raymonds’ luncheons, picnics or overnighters, was invited to sign the guest registry, and two have been preserved, with occasional entries playfully aping Stella’s verse. John Langenbach began a new volume of the Seaview registry on August 1, 1937, by writing, “Another book is on its way, Regarding those who here delay, Where hospitality holds sway, Without a jot of care or sorrow, I’ll be 23 tomorrow.” |
| Raymond Mayor Fred
Tregaskis left his poetic muse at home but commented on the Memorial Day
weekend in 1938, “Thrilled to death over the largest clams and lowest golf
score of the season.”
Not all the guests were of the Raymonds’ generation. Young Mary Laughlin of Raymond brought along an escort April 4, 1938, and Jerry Sanford signed in as ”Mary’s boy friend.” Ray Meredith, about to graduate from Raymond High School, came down on Memorial Day weekend that year and wrote simply, “Had a swell time here as usual.” Not all the guests that summer came from the Raymond area. Several were from Seattle, Tacoma, and Portland, and a few from the Midwest. But finally the 1938 season was over and the Raymonds went down the Seaview November 6 to close up the house. Stella couldn’t resist the opportunity to scribble out another poem: When a little house outlives its need, it is a sad little house indeed. |
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| By 1939 the Raymonds also had
a house up at Grayland and fewer guests going to Seaview, even though Grayland
was just as far from Raymond before the road was cut through to Tokeland.
Leslie’s old friend from his bicycling days in Portland, Howard Gaylord, was the first to sign in at the Grayland house. Gaylord and wife Nellie by then lived at Cannon Beach, OR, when they arrived May 14, 1939, but when they came back for another visit August 25 1943, they listed Raymond as their home. Leslie’s cousins the Hemenways came up from Newport Beach, CA, one weekend in June 1940. Florence wrote that it was “a long trek to visit the cranberry village,” but husband Fred was more diplomatic: “a grand place and a grand time.” Guy and Bess Cagley were up from Raymond that summer, as were Claude and Grace House and the C. S. Bealls, publishers of the Raymond Herald. In 1942 World War II was underway and lives of a number of visitors to Grayland were changing. On the last weekend of March, Charlotte Doty Bench and husband Howard came down from Olympia. “This has been like old times,” Howard wrote, “to be with the Raymonds and Weirs, and we did enjoy everything,” ending his message with a happy face. The Weirs were moving to Alaska. Three other guests, Ruth Curry, Erna Brenner and Lessie Rasco, didn’t identify their hometown, but said they had come to the Raymonds to pick cranberries “for national defense.” Visitor Bud Bailey felt he had gotten even with the Nazis that fall. “I lose my alders but Rommel loses his shirt in Egypt,” he wrote. Good friends Guy and Bess Cagley were with the Raymonds for Mother’s Day the next spring. “It’s so lovely and peaceful here in spite of the war,” Bess wrote in the registry. By 1944 notes in the registry indicated that cousin Kate Stenlund of Berkeley had teamed up with Leslie in the cranberry business. Her share of the harvest that year was 17 boxes, and Leslie’s 34 boxes. Kate was miffed, however, that she still hadn’t been able to beat Stella at pinochle. The next year found Albert Nelson of Raymond delighted to have dug a dozen clams and Lillian Weir up for a visit from Longview, where she had relocated. Husband John was still in Ketchikan, but came by later. Howard Gaylord had died, but his widow Nellie came up for a visit on October 7. Dorothy and John Langenbach visited on October 28, 1947, as did Vena Lewis and Nellie Gaylord, and the next year Eunice and Lester Owens were guests. The widowed Mrs. Gaylord died only two weeks after another visit, in August, 1948, leaving a will which seemed to reflect deep ties to the Raymonds, for she bequeathed First Street real estate and 55 shares of Jantzen Mills stock to Leslie. This, she said, was in deep appreciation of kindness by L. V. to her deceased husband. Howard Gaylord’s 1944 obituary has reflected his favors from Leslie as well as his up and down business career, apparently in sales. A comment in September 1950, that the electric pump had burned out, the refrigerator wouldn’t run and the furnace was smoking is unsigned, as is a recollection on December 8, 1950, “We were here nine years ago yesterday. There has been no real peace since Pearl Harbor. Korea is a defeat now. Truman. Atlee. Acheson!!” Helen Hemenway Eastvedt of Arcada, CA, was back for a visit on September 3, 1955, with Rich, Frank, and Carl. “Wonderful climax to a vacation,” she wrote. “Hiked to the dam with Thayer, clammed, drove on the beach. Wonderful weather, too,” and a month later Huldamay Giesy Buell and husband Ed were there. “Such a nice time, and it has the same feeling with the same folks as the Seaview days,” she wrote. Language in the guest book suggests the Raymonds may have turned over their Grayland property to others, and left the guest book behind. The next two years Frank and Minnie Tracy noted little more than their cranberry harvests. The last recorded guest was Stella Raymond, who “dropped by with two friends” on October 7, 1956. The Grayland property was bequeathed to Huldamay Giesy Buell, but absence of any mention of the Seaview property in the wills indicates the Raymonds must have sold it some years before their deaths. |
| A short reign as founders of city
Their uncontested reign as founders didn’t last long, however, the first challenge on behalf of A. C. Little coming from a postscript to her local history possibly penned by Stella Raymond herself. That Stella had little use for Little is clear from many passages in her diaries, her strongest epithet ironically being that he was a “promoter.” This was a title she used to deprecate Little after she walked into attorney Martin Welsh’s office one day in 1912 and found Little going through deeds she had come in to sign. Her diary doesn’t say what she thought of Welsh for letting A. C. see the papers. When Stella wrote her monograph, “Purporting to be a History of Raymond” in early 1920, Little was either ignored or forgotten, for his name is not mentioned even once in the version published by the Herald in February of that year. Sometime after A. C’s death in California in 1932, however, one more paragraph was appended to the copy of Stella’s text found in the files of the Pacific County Historical Society recently. It concludes: “.... A. C. Little, founder and promoter of the town and arbiter of its early career, in failing health departed about 1915 and spent the last few years of his life in California.” One can imagine how the sentence came to be typed below the body of her paper, with noticeably different margins and much sharper lettering. It is sometime in the 1930s or 1940s and the Raymonds are at home after dinner. Stella has been asked to read her history of the city to another new group of teachers. She freshens up her 1920 text and there’s still nothing in “Purporting” about Little. Leslie has this gentle suggestion: “Well, he’s dead and out of our hair now, and he sank pretty far. Why not give him a plug? Call him the founder. He was here right at the start.” (It is also possible, of course, that the additional “Purporting” text was written by someone other than Stella Raymond who chose not to reveal his or her identity.) Several other opinions have been heard on the “founder” issue. One was that of Willapa Harbor Pilot editor Edwin Connor. Writing in staid next door South Bend early in the 20th century, Connor reveled in all that went on in wide-open Raymond, assiduously promoting Little’s career and entitlement to the “founder” designation. In 1998 the Pacific County Historical Society published an article by Doug Allen, a retired teacher and history researcher, which listed the dozen most important county residents of the 20th century, beginning with A. C. Little , but with scant attention to L. V. Raymond. Ray Meredith, a close friend of the Raymonds who cherishes their memory, stops short of identifying them as the city’s founders. He calls them instead the “stabilizers,” in other words the couple who led the raw young mill town away from the boozing and prostitution that marked its first years with Little as mayor, and gave it staying power. The issue also resurfaced about 1991 when the city added several kiosks to a new park north of Franklin Street. One of the kiosks includes head and shoulders photos of Alexander C. Little and Leslie V. Raymond in their prime, with accompanying text describing Little as “founder” of the city and Raymond as first postmaster and “promoter of the sale of business lots.” The kiosk fails to mention Little’s nine plus years as mayor or the Raymonds’ gift of land for the first sawmill, the many structures L. V. built and creation of the Raymond Foundation. Since the rank of founder is hardly a statutory, elective office, there will always be room for debate about who founded the city of Raymond; as long as the city survives and people care about its past. |
Stella J. Raymond. PCHS #8-30-70-4 (33). |
Welcome to Stella’s World
By Lora Krapohl Nicholson
Step into Stella’s world
“Rainy and windy. Leslie went on train at 7 a.m. George went So.B. on 10 boat. I baked. George here for dinner at 6. Nickie and I left Westport four years ago today for S. Bend. Leslie came the following Monday ....” In a terse 16 words, Stella Raymond memorializes in her 1906 diary; Wed., Oct. 25; what in 1902 must have seemed a daunting undertaking; the building of a city. The plans have been laid all that year; gathering momentum when Leslie lures the Siler Lumber Mill away from Northern Pacific Railroad property in South Bend with a free site on the river bend where the South Fork breaks away from the Willapa River in the muddy, tidal harbor. The Willapa winds through the homestead land Stella has inherited, from her father, Capt. George Johnson. 01 Editor’s Note: Stella’s mother was guardian, not owner of The Island property. She acted on Stella’s behalf as Stella was a minor at the time. |
| With the mill established,
a general store (to be operated by Leslie Raymond and August Rugger) is
opened on the mill’s site, along with a few saloons, and barracks for the
mill workers. Still the whole plan must seem a dismal one for the
spirited 27-year-old woman, who is accustomed to many more conveniences
in Westport, where she and Leslie have resided since their marriage in
1897, running her mother’s general store.
Stella doesn’t tell us where she stays until Leslie arrives two days later with their household goods, but South Bend was a bustling metropolis compared with the rudimentary structures in Raymond, and she may well have stayed with Capt. and Mrs. Stream, old friends of her mother. She certainly would not make her way alone to the Vail House in Riverdale, which is to be their home for the next four years; Stella makes it very clear in her diaries from 1906 through 1916 that companionship is as important to her as food and shelter. The little settlement (not named Raymond until 1904) where she and Leslie are to stake their meager funds and abundant energies, is essentially a cluster of rustic, unpainted buildings. “Trains had to pause before crossing the South Fork draw-bridge and it was possible,” Stella writes in 1920, “for an agile person to alight during that pause and from the railroad track to follow a more or less muddy path to the edge of the Siler Lagoon, and scrambling down a slippery board to make his way across its deep waters on a series of squared boom-sticks or cants, chained together to impound the logs for the mill.” 02 |
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View of First Street looking north from Alder. Russell Bar on the left, Owl Bar on the right. Raymond Trust Company on left. Circa 1910. Thayer Raymond Collection. |
In 1904, with the platting of
the Raymond homestead and the securing of a post office designation for
the Raymond-Rugger general store with Leslie as postmaster, the unincorporated
town is on its way.
“...The little nucleus on the Siler mill property was succeeded by First Street, truly a fearful and wonderful business street, with its high board sidewalk down each side and a constantly growing number of stores, meat markets, lodging houses, barbershops, saloons and |
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dance halls looking at each other across a muddy and impassable void.... A tiny station was built by the Northern Pacific at the south end of First Street and the growth of the town could be measured by the number of additions it acquired.” 03 Stella Raymond begins in 1906 to keep a diary. It is a habit that she continues sometimes for several years running, followed by years when she lays down her pen. Her diaries disclose a rich historical and very personal record of life in Raymond during those early days. Mar. 28, 1906: Beautiful. Went to So. Bend with Mrs. Sturgis on business of importance. (½ yard of blue chiffon for the hat). Returned on 4 o’clock boat. Walked up new sidewalk to old house on Island. Walk just completed.” The four years from 1902 to 1906 teem with construction; planked streets perched atop pilings now bridge the gap between those sidewalks on opposite sides of First Street; houses are built north of Ellis; a small development, again of homes and lodgings, springs up on pilings in the area now occupied by Eighth St. Park. More businesses and homes are erected on 6th and 7th Streets. While the settlement officially becomes a city in August of 1907, it is still the younger, brasher version of its larger, wealthier neighbor, South Bend. Stella, in her diaries, makes clear in 1906 that shopping for clothes, shoes, hats, all the womanly necessities in this rudest of frontier cities, has to be done in South Bend, Tacoma or Seattle. Her 1906 diary is a day-by-day journal of the tremendous energy both Leslie and Stella expend, he in building a business core, she in engineering a social life in the new city, one that would satisfy and reassure the wives of the businessmen Leslie is attracting; and her own need for friends, clubs, parties, and entertainments. Sept. 20, 1906: “Fair and warm. Preserved pears A.M. Dressed and went over town P.M. Mrs. M. (Mallett), Mrs. W. (Wilson) and I called on Mrs. Ladeau, Mrs. Samuels, Mrs. Bazore, Mrs. Sidlinger, Mrs. Hudnall and Mrs. Shahour. Only two at home. Leslie went out to Monohons.” In a ritual that is repeated weekly at least through 1912, Stella, always accompanied by one or more women, calls on the ladies of Raymond and South Bend, leaving her card at their homes, if they are out, or being given tea, if they are home. It is a ritual that would be unimaginable in 2001 with most women working outside the home, but is the cornerstone of the social life of Raymond and South Bend in 1906. Not only do Stella and the other ladies make their calls in couples and larger groups, she frequently searches for a companion to go shopping for groceries. Part of this might be additional evidence of the need for companionship in an often-lonely frontier. But it is also likely a safety measure. What Stella describes as a “fearsome” street has a fair measure of streetwalkers and brothels, and certainly, the mostly-young housewives find one way to signal their status is to work in groups. 04 In addition to a note in 1909 that “Lillie Parker was raided,” Stella says on May 10, 1911, that Mrs. Gailey and Feltz “called this afternoon, to talk of the general topics of interest, the liegira in the lower end, the small girl street walkers...” Life in Raymond is more than social calls and ladies sipping tea. The Raymond’s, living in 1906 in the Vail 05 house, a large old home build on a high bank overlooking the Willapa River in Riverdale, have a constant stream of visitors, with Leslie undoubtedly amazed each evening at who might be sleeping under his roof. From the mid-wife, Mrs. Coxton, who stays with them most of January in 1906 (until near the end of the month when the Naylor baby is born), to captains of ships (and their wives) who are in port to carry away the tons upon tons of lumber, to merchants attracted by advertisements Leslie places in Northwest business magazines, to Stella’s uncles and cousins, Leslie’s father, brother, sister-in-law and niece; all are in and out of their home on a regular basis. |
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Stella had time to cut the grass during their first years on The Island. The budding tree at right suggests late spring; smoke from the mills may set the year at about 1910. |
And, of course, there is “Mamma”;
Lucy Paulding Johnson 06;
who by 1902 has remarried and become Mrs. Thomas Roney. Mamma is
the most welcome of all visitors, the one Stella most misses when she leaves,
and pines for until her return.
July 28, 1909: “Cloudy. Sewed nearly all day. Made myself a blue striped Gibson waist with Dutch collar. Leslie said I looked about 27½ in it. Sent postals to Mamma and Hannah. Not heard from Mamma since the 15th. So lonely. Leslie gone to council. Cat is lonely, too.” In addition to cooking and cleaning, Stella makes many of her own clothes, a constant preoccupation since her long skirts are in frequent contact with the wet, muddy, probably sawdust caked, planked walkways. A piece of material might begin as a skirt, but would be switched from outer skirt, to petticoat, to “waist” (a blouse) to handkerchiefs or perhaps cut down for a child to wear. Summer and fall is packed with canning schedules from raspberries, strawberries, pears, apricots, peaches and apples to blackberries. There is smoking of venison in the fall, bread making and, of course, cakes for the ladies who might call. Time is found to work in the Thursday afternoon meeting of the Ladies Aid, dances, the ever-popular summer picnic, and swimming parties held in the river below their home. |
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April 30, 1906: “...Mrs. Sturgis and I went out the flume for ferns for ice cream social tomorrow night..” May 1: “Mrs. Sturgis and I took apple blossoms over to Commercial Club rooms. P.M. helped serve ice cream. Had good crowd and good time....” May 2: “...Heard the social netted about $30.00.” Between 1902 and 1906 those Raymond families with the means buy lots and build homes in Riverdale. In her 1906 diary, Stella’s best friend and most constant companion is neighbor, Linda Sturgis, wife of Fred Sturgis who has an irregular employment record. In mid-1906, he announces he has taken a job at Rugger’s Mercantile, a job wholly unsatisfactory to Mrs. Sturgis. By 1908 Fred Sturgis has been appointed postmaster of Raymond, probably with Leslie Raymond’s assistance and on April 13, 1909, Stella notes: “Cold, Mrs. Cagley here in afternoon. Mrs. Sturgis came - looking blue. Made a cup of coffee and we discussed the failings of the stronger sex.” During the years that follow, Stella notes that Sturgis takes time out to do some prospecting at Mt. St. Helens, then takes a homestead claim in 1912, but is encouraged by Leslie, instead, to operate one of his properties, the Allen’s place. On Sept. 8, 1912, Stella notes: ... “stopped at Sturgises new ranch to see Linda. Found her crying.” The bonds between these two and other of Stella’s closest companions including Elizabeth (Bess) Cagley, Frances Wilson and Frances Meredith strengthen as they confide, commiserate, celebrate together; and as the city grows and conveniences come to Raymond, they find a social life linked to afternoon parties of embroidery, good works and....cards. Games of whist are replaced by 500, and later by bridge. By the end of 1906, most of the city’s conveniences and burgeoning activities are located across the river in the city’s core. She and Leslie decide to move into one of the apartments above his office at First and Ellis. On Oct. 23 she notes: “Guess we can make it do with some small changes.” They move in Nov. 10 and on Nov. 13 : “Went So. Bend in bad storm to get range. Got a Universal.” By mid-1908 Leslie and Stella are preparing for another move, this time a permanent one. Stella’s cousin Nora (Lenora Paulding) has come to live with the Raymonds, both as a companion for Stella and as a dependable, sharp-minded water company office worker for Leslie. On Feb. 22 of 1908, she and Nora walk up to the old homestead on the Island to pick a site for a summer cottage. What starts as a plan for a simple cottage is recast by Leslie into a home; one, which undergoes many modifications in coming years, but which, is their home until their deaths in 1960-61. Mar. 3, 1908: “Leslie and I went up to Island in A.M. and decided where to put house. In P.M. Nora and I went up and planted sweet peas and nasturtiums.” Leslie signs the building contract with Clarence Philbrick, local architect and builder, and the adventure begins. She notes on Mar. 16 the house is started; on Mar. 21, Leslie decides to add two gables; Mar. 24 Philbrick produces plans for finishing the upstairs and later she has chosen the windows; Mar. 29, “house ready for plasterers downstairs, wired and plumbed both floors.” By June 9, she and Nora begin packing the apartment and on June 15, she writes: “12TH AND ELLIS ST. Moved to our new home.” They move into a home with only the most rudimentary kitchen, because on Oct. 16 the carpenters come to build the kitchen and back porch. On Oct. 31: “Cooked supper in new kitchen.” On Nov. 9, she adds: “Nora and I built roof on our back porch in morning and shingled it.” Work continues at a furious pace and by mid November, Mr. Pettis is painting the downstairs rooms and the next day, Stella has put down the carpets in the living and dining rooms. Oct. 31, 1909: “Mamma and I went out and looked at the new houses - MacPhails, Lewises and Myers. Leslie went out and diverted Butte Creek, as afraid of flooding Riverdale...” By 1908, Leslie has advertisements in the Raymond Herald describing the Island as the most prestigious neighborhood in which to live. The homestead land is in both their names, so she, too, must sign each deed for lots which Leslie sells, and thus in her diary notes signing deeds to, among others, Mr. Rider, Mr. Barrett, Johnson, Mary Dixon, Nora, Swain, Philbrick, Cotterill, Glazeboook. Among those in 1909 are Norgren, Hiatt, Lenora Paulding, Taylor, Donavan, Burke, Faulkner, Wilson, Cagley, Myers, Fournier, Glazebrooks (again), Lewis and MacPhail. In 1910, she notes Fee, Ferris, Owens, Lebers, Soule, Henrys, Pederson, Turners, Schoemaker, George Raymond, Lyons, and Mrs. Coats. Editor’s Note: Washington is a community property state, which means that both spouses would have to sign the deeds or the purchaser would have to obtain a quitclaim from the surviving non-signer in order to clear the deed in the future. Not an uncommon occurrence, even to this day. |
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Thayer Raymond. |
All in the family
Perhaps closest to her heart though is the deed she signs to Mamma for lots on the northwest corner of Ellis and 12th, (price $1.00) right across the street from her and L. V.’s home. She shows Lucy (who in late 1909 has sold her houseboat in Seattle and moved to rental property in Raymond) a book of house plans. In March, Mamma even talks with a contractor, Mr. Fitzell, who takes her plans and gives her a bid on the construction of a house. In July 1910, Stella sketches her own ideas for a house for Mamma; but Mamma and Tom are bobbing and weaving. They take a trip, then another trip and by 1911 Lucy makes it official. July 7, 1911: “Mamma and Tom talking their abominable scheme of moving to North Cove. I hate the place.” July 21: “Mamma beginning to get ready to leave us.” July 24: “Mamma and Tom and Dooley (their dog) took 2:30 boat for North Cove, there to make their home.” (1911 diary) |
| In 1909, Nora leaves
for Tacoma to attend business school but in 1910, George Raymond and his
wife Hannah and daughter Ruth (Thayer) Raymond decide to cast their fortunes
with Leslie and Stella in this new city. He, a long time employee
of the Northern Pacific Railroad, gives notice and by March, they move
into one of Leslie’s properties on 10th St. In 1912 they build their
own home at 14th and Duryea, perched on the hill overlooking the North
Fork.
The consolidation of family members in Raymond is important to Stella. Moreover, Hannah, whose calming, practical influence can be felt in the diary, is a steadying addition to Stella’s life. Hannah is a rock of strength in the gossipy, socially complicated world of Raymond. Dec. 28, 1908: “Sunshine, rain. Went downtown in P.M. Signed Glazebrook deed. Found Mamma at Mrs. Cagley’s. Letter from Geo. Sending Father R. back to us tomorrow. Mamma and I played cribbage and read Mary Platt Parnele’s History of France, one of my Christmas books. Rain again.” Stella and Hannah share the care of William Raymond, their husbands’ father and he, throughout the diaries 1906 to 1914, moves between the two households every three months. Also making frequent appearances are Uncle Joe and Uncle Hiram Paulding, Lucy’s brothers, both of whom are older than Mamma and, at times, in poor health. There are continued visits to the Raymond home in 1909 by Nora and Gina Johnson, who with Nora lives in Tacoma and attends business school; and Jessie Johnson who completes her nurses training in 1909 and comes back to Raymond periodically. By 1910, Nora has completed business school courses and decides in early January to buy the Willapa store with her twin brother, Leonard Paulding. Despite Stella’s strong advice against such a move (probably based on years of experience as her mother’s helper as well as her and Leslie’s work in Westport), Nora buys the store. Stella and Nora continue their friendship with Nora frequently riding into Raymond on errands and convincing Stella to begin horseback riding. A year later, Nora marries Jack Hatchard and Stella takes her a wedding present of silverware. One of Stella’s truest joys, however, is her relationship with Ruth Raymond, George and Hannah’s daughter who later drops her first name and becomes officially Thayer Raymond. Stella worries in 1908 when Ruth and Hannah don’t come for Christmas because Ruth is diagnosed with scarlet fever; she and Hannah conspire each year to host a birthday party for Ruth, and then in 1911 George and Hannah leave the 14-year-old Ruth and “Father R” in Stella’s “custody” while they take a trip to Portland. Stella crams a month’s worth of activities into a week, taking Ruth on buggy rides, to shows and on shopping trips, teaching her to crochet and knit, and letting her make a cake. |
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Thayer, Hannah and George Raymond on a visit to Vancouver, B.C., in June, 1940. |
While Stella and Leslie have
no children, they finally in 1913 have an opportunity to share the successes
and heartaches of parenthood by bringing a freshman high school student
into their home; Clara Jacobsen; daughter of Elise and Martin Jacobsen,
parents of ten children in North Cove. Mrs. Jacobsen served as postmistress
of North Cove for 25 years in the first decades of the century and possibly
Lucy recognizes the beneficial effect Clara could have on the Raymonds
and them on her.
In June of 1913, Clara and Lucy are visiting Stella and by fall, the course is set. Stella and Clara begin feverishly sewing school clothes for Clara, including a black Norfolk coat. Clara completes their small family circle, with Stella attending school plays, chaperoning school dances, taking in basketball games, watching Clara compete in track, and attending movies, the circus, taking buggy rides with Billy and, of course, something Stella knows a lot about - shopping. There is no indication that Clara has any real obligations, beyond what any family member would undertake, sharing housekeeping duties, and helping with canning. In the meantime, Stella makes Halloween costumes, has a prom gown tailored professionally by her dressmaker when Clara is invited to the 1914 prom. |
| Fri., May 29, 1914:
“Fine. Leslie taught Clarence H. (Heath) to drive. Took Mrs.
Cagley and drove to Holcomb. First time I had driven above E. Raymond.
Ruts disturbed me. Clara went to Rondilla party in evening.
Young boy came here thinking Thayer lived here, Clara wept.” Thus,
Clara and Stella weather the sour taste of rejection.
Still Thayer and Clara are close friends along with Grace Weaver and Charlotte Hicks. That Clara and Stella remain close is evident in 1922. Jan 24, 1922: “Called Clara up... Clara’s baby is over three weeks old. She was with me four days leaving a week ago yesterday.” The name of Clara’s baby? Stella. Father R’s life comes to a peaceful end on Feb. 2, 1914, and Stella describes the tribute paid to the father who had spent so many years living in their, and George’s, homes: Death of Father Raymond. George called up about 7:30 that he found Father R. dead in his bed. He had evidently died in his sleep. We all went up to the cemetery in CarterCar and selected burial lots for all of us. George and family here to lunch and dinner. Many called during afternoon. Leslie phoned Westport to phone No. Cove to tell Mamma. Wed., Feb. 4, 1914: “Showers. Hettie 07 had us all down for luncheon. Went to chapel after and saw flowers and Father R. Came home and stayed until cars came for us. Had Geo. R’s here at dinner in evening. Flowers at funeral very lovely and very many.” After a lengthy cross-country car trip in 1916, Stella halts her diaries for many years, with only occasional yearly notes on activities. However, in 1924 she tells of a big family event - Thayer’s marriage. April 6, 1924: “This has certainly been a busy Sunday: Beginning early because I had promised to take Tom to Riverview Hospital at 10 a.m. to have his lip x-rayed. Leslie, however, took him. About 11 a.m. Cagleys came in and I asked them to return to dinner about 3 p.m. About 1:30 Ellis and Thayer called and I exhibited my new Chinese rugs and they surprised me by announcing that they were going to be married immediately and desired to have the event take place here. We laid the rugs, routed Leslie out of the tub, hunted the preacher, diverted the Cagleys, persuaded Tom to postpone asking Leslie’s assistance with a recalcitory stove until after the ceremony, hustled Hannah, awaited the best man; one George Murch; heard the ceremony, snapshotted the young couple, sent them all on their way, dined the Cagleys, went for a ride and saw a motor mishap, came home picking up Clara as she came off duty nursing George, sent her home with Guy (Cagley) to have her return almost at once urging us to go to a fire on Duryea St.; the store building just purchased by Mrs. Frank Rogers. Leslie has retired very weary and George is recovering unaware of the fact that his daughter is spending the first night of her married life in Raymond Apts. George has been ill for ten days with pneumonia. Mrs. Sweitzer night and Clara day nurse... After many anxious days he seems on road to recovery.” Thayer’s marriage to George E. (Ellis) Maxey, however is short lived. During Stella’s and Leslie’s world tour the very next year, Stella notes she has received word of Thayer’s troubles from Hannah. The marriage ends. |
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Four friends of Stella Raymond, from left: Hannah Raymond, Grace Holbrook, Clara Jacobsen and Bess Cagley. PCHS #1993.80.18. |
Getting out the vote
When Stella begins keeping her diary in 1906, she is a mere onlooker in the political process, Leslie being elected on Sept. 6, 1906, as a delegate to the Republican County Convention. Election Day Nov. 3, 1908, is mostly a social occasion for Stella and her crowd because the Saffords have a card party as election night entertainment. That Taft and Sherman are elected is worth only a dismissively brief note. |
| Oct. 4, 1909:
“Letter from Mrs. DeVoe asking me to be Pacific Co. Assistant in Woman
Suffrage Cause. I’d be a peach.” While this report has a ring
of sarcasm, the Raymonds are certainly for women’s suffrage, with Leslie
voting in favor on Nov. 8, 1910.
Wed., Nov. 9, 1910: “...Election returns indicate woman suffrage has carried. Should I ever have the chance, I will vote against Mr. Roosevelt.” While she and Hannah are quick to register as voters on Feb. 7, 1911, and vote for the first time that same year on Nov. 6, Stella doesn’t tell us how she votes. There’s nothing quite like presidential politics, however, to drag the disinterested into the fray. June 20, 1912: “...Republican National Convention meeting in Chicago. Roosevelt and Taft in mighty struggle. June 23, 1912: “...Taft and Sherman nominated yesterday at Chicago.” July 1, 1912: “...No nominations yet Democratic convention at Baltimore... Oct. 16, 1912: Word received that Roosevelt had been shot by crank at Chicago. Not much hurt but plenty free advertising.” Her dislike for Roosevelt continues and on Nov. 5 she reports: “...Hannah came and we went to polls in auto. I voted for Wilson electors. At 10 p.m. went to Commercial Club to hear returns. All indicated Wilson.” |
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Additional photo of the steam schooner Solano |
All news is local
That elections could bring the outside world into Raymond is perhaps proof that it took a big event indeed to capture local attention. Stella notes on April 1, 1906: Cloudy. Earthquake has destroyed San Francisco. Shocks were felt here at 11 p.m. and 4 a.m. last night. No particulars received yet. |
| The next day: I went to Ladies Aid
at Mrs. Dennis’s. Particulars of S. F. earthquake and fire in tonight’s
paper. Anxious to know about our friends. And on Tues., April
24, she reports: “Misty. Leslie gone to So. Fork with petition
for Union High School. Gave $14.20 for S. F. relief. The $14.20
is undoubtedly all she has in her household savings.”
With Halley’s Comet making regular tours through the night skies in 1910, the Raymonds join other Americans, rising at odd hours of the night to catch a glimpse of the gaseous ball. Nevertheless, as old-timers of the northwest know a clear night is hard to find. Finally on Mon., May 22, 1912: “...In evening Cagley’s came over and we watched the eclipse of moon and Halley’s comet from the bleachers. Could plainly see latter’s tail. Moon beautiful.” Important as these events are, however, they probably paled in comparison to more local news. The entire town is ready to picnic and party when the Willapa is launched from the Dickie 08 shipyard on Mar. 31, 1908. Stella and Nora make their picnic items the day before, and the entire town is given a half day off and excited residents sit on the banks for the spectacle. Mar. 31, 1908: “Lovely. The Willapa was launched at 12:40, ten minutes ahead of time. Ran into launch and bank just above our wharf....” Four months later the Majestic is launched and Raymond’s brief reputation in the boat-building world is established. The Dickie shipbuilding company is the outgrowth of Leslie’s call on Dickie in Aberdeen Oct. 24, 1906, and his outreach pays off in December when Dickie comes to Raymond to see what Leslie has to offer. Fri., Dec. 7: “Had Mr. Dickie to dinner tonight. Leslie spent the day showing him the town.” Dickie’s shipbuilding days are short, however, as financial problems beset him and by 1910 the courts act to put the business in receivership. Three ships are built at the Dickie yard, Willapa, Doris, and Majestic. The shipyard site is eventually taken over by Captain Peterson, and two more ships, the Solano and Mukilteo, are built there before he too has financial trouble. A little further down stream Porter-Sanderson establishes a shipyard during WWI which continues until the end of the war. Mon., Mar. 9, 1908: “Lovely. Sewed in afternoon. Much excitement in town over raiding of saloons last night. Trial today of gamblers and saloon men. Mrs. Mallett here in evening. Tommie Stream in trouble.” 09 Stella’s diaries are a day by day picture of Raymond weather at its best and worst and while they relish the “lovely” days and ignore the inconvenience of the rainy ones, high tides and snow get a little more description. Jan., 5, 1908: Biggest tide since we have had a town here - in all buildings on First St. except in Wakefield Hotel 10 vicinity. The big snowstorm of 1909 captures her attention. Wed., Jan. 6: A heavy coat of snow met our eyes this morning...Sturgises and Holy Fishers came up with bobsleds. Nora and I went out and slid a few times, but snow too dry. The snow continues falling with only a few interruptions and when the sun comes out it is dazzling. Ten days later, it begins raining and quickly the winter wonderland disappears. While the snow provides a needed winter diversion, it couldn’t compare with the news-making value of the gale that begins Nov. 29, 1909: “Big storm. Grandstand blew down about 9 a.m....Tide in houses and buildings never touched before. Mills closed. Linda’s (Sturgis) house flooded. She came home with us...” Wed, Dec. 2, 1909: “...Leslie phoned that 1 million logs were lost from North River boom and 100,000 from Humptulips.” Gold is always news and some Raymondites are prospectors at heart. Tues., Sept. 20, 1910: “Took Mrs. Bean for a drive in afternoon. In evening Leslie and I drove down to office to see Mr. Burke. He and Fred Sturgis and Floyd Lewis are going up near Mt. St. Helen’s to take up mining claims.” Thurs., Feb. 1, 1912: “Lovely day. News in Oregonian yesterday of gold discovery on South Fork at home.” Crime rarely makes its way into Stella’s diaries, perhaps because there is none...or perhaps none not related to liquor, prostitutes and barroom fights. She does note on Feb. 14, 1908, that Werley’s store in South Bend was robbed the night before. No public emergency can vie with the ringing of the fire bells and the blowing of mill sirens. All able-bodied men rush to answer the call when fire hits and usually the focus seems to be on preventing the spread of flames. Sat., Mar. 27, 1909: “Fair, misty. Gaylord came on train. After dinner we went downtown expecting to go to basket ball game at Firemen. Stopped at Mrs. Sturgis’s. Found her sick. While I was still there firebell rang. Fred vanished. I took her over to Donovans from where we saw Carter’s, Duryea’s, and Hoagland’s houses burn....” Sat., June 25, 1910: “Lovely....Firebell rang shortly. Lathrops (Cotterills) on 13th St. burned down. Everyone there. ...In P.M. went to game. Raymond beat Aberdeen 8 to 3. Mrs. Wilson went with me. Cagleys over in evening. Played croquet and 500. Burt Lewis bought Dickie home.” Fire in a city built of wood is a constant fear in 1910 with Stella reporting on Aug. 24: “Local forest fires growing worse. For more than a week the flames continue to eat at the woods.” On Aug. 31 she drives Billy out to far Miller place, taking Mrs. Wilson. Got apples and crabapples. Fires close to road as we came back. Aug. 14, 1912: “Were awakened 2 a.m. by fire bell. Looked like our office. Leslie hurried down. I dressed, he phoned me to bring horse as they might want to move books. Fire was across street in Bullard Building and Beehive Store. When I got down it still looked dangerous but they succeeded in getting it out. Returned with Hannah and Ruth at 4 a.m. Made coffee and went up and slept until seven. Leslie came but did not sleep long. Canned 16 1/2 quarts string beans in forenoon.” Catastrophes are numerous, though none matches the burning of a mill, or a town. Sept. 23, 1913: “Awakened at 8:45 by Southwest Mill whistle; got up and through fog could see mill ablaze from end to end. Leslie dressed and went. Later Bess came and I dressed and we went, too. In afternoon Tuesday Club met at Mrs. MacPhails’s.” May 21, 1914: “Hot. Mrs. Cagley came over in afternoon to go swimming with report Lebam was burning. Leslie came late from pump station. Mayor Little called up and wanted him to take supplies to Lebam. I went along. Town a heap of glowing coals. |
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Ninth Street, Old Baptist Church, 1908. PCHS #7-31-70-1 (6). |
Modern conveniences
By 1908 Raymond is leaving behind some of its rustic beginnings with the opening of a moving picture show and young residents taking Kodak pictures of their own activities; like picnics, swimming, and berry picking. She and Nora have their photo taken in December of that year at Blakely’s photo studio and like them so much she returns the next day with Leslie in tow. |
| Electricity, still
sporadic in most residential areas, finally makes it up to the Island on
Oct. 24, 1908, and in April of 1909, Leslie brings Stella a coffee percolator
and alcohol burner she has had her eye on. April 6, 1909: “Leslie
brought home shower bath. I tried it before dressing for club.”
Then on June 24, 1909, the convenience that links Raymond to the rest of
America: “Fair. Straightened up the laundry this morning.
Mrs. Cagley over. Leslie called me up (red 105 at home, main 38 at
office) first time on new phone to say he would not be home to lunch...”
Mon., Mar. 27, 1910: “Fair. Knuth here painting house. Took nap in P.M., awakened by “dirt eater” coming in my room. He began cleaning upstairs carpets about 4:30. I shall never be happy until I own a vacuum cleaner myself.” |
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| Boats, bikes, buggies, trains, trolleys and THE MACHINE
The most reliable form of transportation around town in these early years is attached to the body. Stella and a growing number of housewives get around on their own two feet, taking walks, which in 2001 would require a car. Moreover, Leslie many years earlier had taught her how to ride a bike, which is undoubtedly his favored method of transportation being the champion cyclist that he is. The only highway Raymond knows in the first decade of the new century is not a trail of gravel or asphalt, rather a ribbon of water that winds endlessly at high tide through neighborhoods and even the fearsome First Street, tying together business core, neighborhoods and mills. Most families have boats and in August of 1908, Leslie and Stella acquire a motor launch, which is vital since he is involved in enlarging the water system that he and Stella have owned since 1906. His work takes him out to Butte Creek and “out South Fork.” That they don’t have their own launch until 1908 testifies to how stretched they are financially in those early years and perhaps to Leslie’s reluctance toward undertaking the mechanics of water travel. At one point Stella describes his method of steering the boat as “fearful and wonderful,” and when he becomes involved in a project he sometimes forgets about the tide, leaving his launch marooned in a tidal marsh. Aug., 15, 1909: “Cloudy A.M.; P.M. warm. Mrs. Leach and Mr. and Mrs. Cagley went for launch ride with us about 1 p.m. Went down as far as mouth of North River. Returning Guy (Cagley) ran launch ashore at Sea Haven. Trezise launch came along and rescued Geo., Hannah, Father R., Mrs. Leach, Mrs. C. and me. Leslie and Guy got home at midnight. I gave them lunch. Rest had dinner with us. Leslie and Guy make good use of their time waiting for the incoming tide, digging enough clams for a party the next night.” From the earliest days of Raymond, however, the residents ride between Raymond and South Bend aboard the Lassie and Shamrock. Aside from shopping, Leslie and Stella have frequent business trips to So. Bend registering the plats for their real estate “divisions,” meeting with Martin Welsh, their attorney, testifying in court cases, shopping, attending social events and attending the many productions in the opera hall. Mar. 21, 1908: “Fair. A RED LETTER DAY. First buggy ride I’ve had in Raymond. Leslie and I walked up to see house after lunch....Miss Brown, Sturgis and I borrowed Whitcomb’s buggy. Finn dance in evening.” That buggy ride whets Stella’s appetite, however, and by 1910, she begins her campaign to buy a horse, “Billy,” from the Dolan Livery. June, 14, 1910: “Cloudy. L. showed Schoemaker and Burnside lots. Decided this morning again that I wanted a horse. Went downtown before lunch and walked up with Leslie. He prefers an auto. Have the blues....” June, 28, 1910: “Lovely. Intended to make calls but Leslie got “Billie” and took me for a drive out towards Smith Creek...had lovely time. Picked armsful of honeysuckle. Asked Dolan what he wanted for Billie. ($150)” June 30, 1910: “Windy. Leslie said I could get Billy so when Hannah, Ruth and Georgia went to train, I went with them and stopped at stable. Dolan said I could not have him until after the Fourth.” July 5, 1910: “Fine, sultry. Went down to Dolan’s stable with Leslie in morning. Drove Billie home. He loaned us buggy and harness. Leslie and I drove out to Monohon place. Raked the hay out of dam and let it fill. Cooked supper on fireplace and slept in barn with Billie. He and Leslie both having stomach trouble.” July 15, 1910: “Took Linda for drive in P.M. Went to Willapa on N. side of river and returned on south side. Stopped at Shepard and Dennis’s. Found Leslie there and ordered a buggy.” The acquisition of Billy (Stella finally settles on this spelling) can be likened somewhat to a 16-year-old getting his driver’s license today. Suddenly Stella is driving everywhere, looking for excuses to drive downtown, out to Willapa, or South Bend. On July 7, she and Hannah drive Billy to South Bend “First time I ever went over the road.” In addition, as complications mount for Leslie at the South Fork pumping station, Billy is equally shared and Leslie begins calling Billy “the water company horse.” By 1911, Nora has Stella riding on Billy’s back, with Stella noting Billy’s surprise. Horseback rides with Miss Shields, Miss Shahour and Mrs. Wilson become a regular Sunday morning treat. Though automobiles (Stella calls them “machines”) are becoming more popular there is still no road connecting Raymond with Chehalis or Aberdeen, so their usefulness is limited. Stella is more worried about meeting trains than autos. August 23, 1911: “Met Mr. Swain at office and took him for drive. Came rather near getting run over by freight train near depot crossing to So. Fork bridge. Dined at Iveson at seven.” Other than the “marine route.” the railroad is the only way out of Raymond during the years of Stella’s early diaries; and she and Leslie take full advantage of the passenger trains which become more frequent as Raymond expands. Travel between Raymond and Seattle-Tacoma, and Portland, is relished by the Raymonds, and until late in 1909, Stella makes two or three visits each year to Mamma in Seattle staying from a week to a month each time. In 1908, the Atlantic Fleet makes a tour of west coast ports and Raymond is abuzz with activity; some going out to North Cove to view it from afar, others determined to see it up close in Tacoma. Sat., May 22, 1908: “Warm. Decided to go to Seattle to see fleet in morning. Mended my jumper suit that I tore last night. Mr. Jeffress came on train. Everyone says trains so crowded, we gave up going. Went to glass blowers in evening.” By Monday, however, she, Leslie, and Father R have decided to make the trip, and see the arrival of the fleet from Cliff Ave. in Tacoma, eight battleships and the hospital ship, Relief. A five day visit with Hannah is just the start, however, for she then takes off for Seattle and Mamma, for a six day visit. That same year she and Leslie visit Mamma with Leslie’s intention of investigating a brickyard in Tacoma first; followed by tours of the rapidly growing Seattle with side trips on the Princess to Kennydale. Leslie returns to Raymond but Stella stays and after eight days of social calls and shopping her vacation culminates in an afternoon at Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show at 29th and Yesler. When the Alaskan-Yukon-Pacific Exposition opens in Seattle in 1909, Stella spends much of May visiting Mamma, seeing plays like “The Honor of the Family” with Otis Skinner, “The Doll House” with Alla Nazirnova and “The County Chairman.” Leslie accompanies her, but only long enough to get Orland Gamage’s signature on a contract for land he needs to complete the South Fork water pumping complex. When the fair opens in June she listens to a speech by Jim Hill 11, tours the buildings, hears Innes’s band and when Leslie returns for her on May 30, they spend three days at the exposition, see “The Merry Widow” at the Moore on June 3, and return to Raymond the next day. In September, with the exposition about to close, Mamma sells the houseboat, or as Stella calls it “the ark,” which has been her Seattle headquarters and sends an urgent letter to Stella to come and help her pack up for the big move to Raymond. Stella is on the 3:20 train the next day to Tacoma and a day later rises early to take the Interurban train in to Seattle. For three days, she and Mamma wash and iron, pack and scrub the “ark.” On the fourth day Mamma sends her off to the exposition with Mr. and Mrs. Welsh (the diary doesn’t say whether Martin or John) and she hears William Jennings Bryan speak. |
The Carter car leaves for Pe Ell. PCHS #1993.80.43. |
Mamma, Tom and Stella take rooms at the Brighton Hotel and she spends another eight days shopping with Mamma, taking quick trips to visit the George Raymonds in Tacoma, then notes on Sept. 22: “Found telegram. Leslie coming tonight. Tom had gone. Got room....Leslie arrived about 11:30 p.m. Actually told me I looked pretty.” |
| With Mamma and Tom
triumphantly installed first at Stella’s and Leslie’s home and later in
one of her own rental properties, the Raymonds turn their attention away
from Seattle. In February of 1910 they make another business (for
Leslie) trip to Aberdeen.
Mon., Feb. 21, 1910: “Cold - bitter east wind. Leslie and I took 7:15 train to Aberdeen. (This involves going from Raymond to Centralia then west again through Montesano to Aberdeen) Arrived there about 1:30. Walked around then visited Hoquiam. Met Mr. Carpenter, went to see Mrs. Bush. In evening went to see Chas. Hanford in ‘An American Lord.’ Saw Miss Frances Brown 12 at theater. Staying at Hotel Washington. Aberdeen is great.” Their trip home five days later isn’t an easy one. Fri., Feb. 25, 1910: “Rainy. Started for home at 8:30 a.m. Arrived here 7 p.m. Delayed at Centralia until 3:30 then had to walk around bridge at Holcomb to train this side.” From 1910 through 1912, the Raymonds make Portland their shopping destination; both because it draws many from Raymond, and because Leslie’s good friend Howard Gaylord lives there with his family. They make the Netherlands Hotel their Portland home, and Leslie continues mixing business and pleasure, spending his days making contacts, buying pumps and pipes and evenings attending plays and vaudeville shows with Stella and the Gaylords. Tues., Aug. 2, 1910: (Portland) “Leslie gave me $25 to buy plume. Paid $20 for an “Amazon.” Think it a beauty. He bought a concrete mixer and electric motor. Had our last dinner at the Imperial Grill. Walked around the old St. Mary’s convent and packed our grips for home after a splendid time.” The concrete mixer is linked to Leslie’s next water company project, the construction of a water tower behind their home. It begins in earnest in April of 1911. The tower is vital because the mills use much of the water company’s capacity during daytime, leaving housewives and other businesses to scrape along on water for necessities like laundry. By April 28 she notes that standpipe is now over 30 feet, and by October the concrete mixer is ready to pour concrete on tank. Nov. 4 she says, “Leslie has over 18 feet of tank done.” May. 24, 1912: “Called up Mrs. Wilson in afternoon. Got her to go with me to So. Bend, first ride on street car. Went to hospital to see Mrs. Martin Welsh and baby daughter. Came back on car with mill men and W.C.T.U. women....” The streetcar brings real convenience to travel between Raymond and South Bend and suddenly afternoon parties, study groups and, of course, shopping becomes even easier. Trips to North Cove and Mamma invariably start off with a trolley ride to South Bend, then the Shamrock or Reliable to North Cove. The trolley opens the way to home development along the track and soon the Herald is carrying advertisements for home sites with easy convenience to the trolley. It is, however, the death of water travel between the two towns. By mid-1913, Leslie is convinced of the inevitability of the automobile as a means of transportation and on June 29, they leave for Seattle to begin a systematic investigation into “the machine.” July 1: Showers. Met Leslie again at Frederick and Nelsons’ called at Mrs. Gosnell’s; not at home then looked at Wintons, Whites, Overlands, Pathfinders. Rode in Hupmobile and returned to Hotel in an Oakland Roadster. Went to Orpheum. The next day Dr. Gosnell tells Leslie about the CarterCar, which he has just purchased and on the third the Raymonds ride in Buicks and Cadillacs. By July 4th, Leslie has reached a decision; it’s to be a CarterCar which they buy for $1,600. The agent, a Mr. Peek takes them out to Bothell road where he “lets Leslie drive the machine.” July 5, 1913: “Fine. Left Seattle about noon in our car with Peek boy driving. Arrived Olympus Hotel about 2. Ate and went to auto races at Lakeview. Left about 5:30. Overtaken and fined $25 by deputy sheriff for speeding. Arrived Centralia before nine. Stayed at Centralia Hotel.” July 6, 1913: “Showers. Left Centralia in a downpour about eleven. Roads good. Ate luncheon at Montesano. Got gasoline at Aberdeen. Found mudholes at Markham. Saw Mrs. Beaulieu at Ocosta. Ate supper Cohasset. Stuck in soft sand at No. Cove. Arrived Mamma’s at nine.” July 8, 1913: “Fine. Peek boy and I drove to Tokeland. Leslie came 8:30 boat. Johnny Whitcomb’s launch brought scow. We ate lunch at Kindred’s, embarked about 2 p.m. and home at 4:30. Landed at So. B. Clara and I went with boys for ride in evening. Leslie drove to Willapa.” The water route is still the only way to bring something as big as a car into Raymond and so the Raymonds’ introduction to the trials and travails of motoring begin. The Raymonds like their CarterCar so well, they buy a second, smaller Carter, with the hope obviously of selling it when they return to Raymond. Leslie soon has advertisements in the paper as a CarterCar dealer. It’s unclear whether he ever has more than one car to sell. |
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| Dog days
Billy isn’t the only animal in the Raymond family. Stella has a chicken pen and chicken; home bred and home fed; is quick and easy, except for the one that ends up on the dinner platter. Tues., Jan.14, 1908: “Fair. All O.K. today. Leslie went to Monohon place, got water wheel to working. Our high cockalorum was licked by someone’s stray red low cockalorum. Leslie rescued and I washed him and he has spent day on oven door.” Late in 1908 Mickie, the dog that accompanies Stella on the boat to South Bend that fateful day in 1902 becomes ill. Dec., 5, 1908: “Mickie ailing, worse today.” Sat., Dec. 12, 1906: “Mickie dead. Mamma heard Mickie crying after the whistles began to blow. When Leslie got up the poor old fellow was dead. Age 11 years....” The next day, Leslie buries the dog they have had all 11 years of their marriage, near the old pear tree my father planted. On Oct. 5, 1909, Stella reports: “Canned pears A.M. Mrs. Safford called up that she and Sturgis would be up in P.M. to Cagley’s. Waited until after 3 for them, then we went over to the graders to see St. Bernard puppies - 5 of them and beauties. I, of course, want one.... The next day she takes Leslie with her and they buy one for $10. A beauty. I think I will call him Heinie.” Unfortunately by January 1910, Heinie is seriously ill; so ill they call in the family doctor, Dr. Barkman, who prescribes Calomel for the puppy. Wed., Jan. 26, 1910: “...When we returned about 5:30 looked for Heine. Found him lying down on wet tideland; carried him home. Think he’ll die.” She and Leslie begin a program of pushing milk down the dog’s throat in a vain attempt to strengthen him. After nine days, Heinie lays down under a blackberry bush and dies. |
The First Baptist Church of Raymond was built in 1908 and moved to the rear of the church property when a larger structure was built. It is still in use. PCHS #1993.13.4.6. |
Say a little prayer for me
Religion hardly seems to be a matter of deep commitment for the Raymonds in these early city-building years. In 1906 there are two churches; the Methodist and the Baptist. When they attend, it is the Baptists that get their business. Thurs., May 17, 1906: “Mrs. Jessie Johnson came on noon boat. Nora went on 1:15. Mrs. S. (Sturgis), Jessie and I went across, called on people for cakes. |
| Went to Ladies Aid late. Jessie and
I had argument with Mrs. Kettner on Bible.” (Mrs. Kettner is wife
of Harry Kettner, owner of the Kettner Hotel - “A Bible in every room.”)
Fri., May 18, 1906: “Still showery. Mrs. Sturgis went to S. B. with Nora, Jessie and I, walked to Mrs. Naylors....Mrs. Kettner prayed for me at prayer meeting last night, slighted Jessie.” When church meets in 1906, it apparently is in the evening, perhaps because that’s when the minister arrives on his circuit. Sun., July 22, 1906: “Church in evening. Mrs. Naylor sat on floor and we disgraced ourselves laughing.” When Mamma and Tom move to Raymond in 1910, the Raymonds spotty attendance record improves. Jan., 16, 1910: “Cleaned house up good....Leslie, Mamma and I went to the Baptist Church. They immersed several boys. Good sermon.” In September of 1910 the Baptist minister, Rev. Ewald, leaves to take up duties on the Flathead Reservation in Montana, and there is no further mention of church until April 2, 1911: “Leslie up early; breakfasted with Geo. and went out So. Fork. I went down to Hettie’s to breakfast at 10, then went with Hannah to Baptist Church. First sermon by Mr. Wightman, the new pastor, a nice looking youth. Still enthusiastic. Rode out So. Bend road with Leslie who helped unload pipe.” One week later, however, there’s a signal of impending discord. April 9, 1911: “The new minister is red hot evangelist, trying to get everyone into fold. Afraid we will find it more comfortable not to attend at all.” By July she and Mamma are sampling the Christian Science Lectures and in 1912 Stella and Leslie begin attending the Presbyterian Church. In 1913, however, Stella steers Clara into Baptist Sunday School and other church activities, frequently attending Sunday services herself. |
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Raymond's first bank, at First and Commercial Streets. |
Financial woes
That Leslie is a workaholic in these early years is apparent in Stella’s diaries. In addition to engaging in essential leadership in the building of Raymond, Leslie sees the need for a expanded water system one that can accommodate a burgeoning population. Harsh words are exchanged in 1906 between Leslie and A.C. Little who is his partner in the electric and water company. |
| With that confrontation, Leslie demands control
of the rudimentary system, which A.C. finally agrees to, but not without
the Raymonds assuming much debt.
Debt mounts as he sets out to bring fresh water into the town via a tunnel through Butte Creek Hill. The project is long, wearisome and worrisome and when it is finished he begins building a pumping station on the South Fork to bring in more water. He serves on the city council, works every day, keeps real estate office hours Monday and Friday evenings as well, serves on the road and train commissions, is a steady force in the Commercial Club and the city development organization, is instrumental in construction of the North Fork bridge 13 to Riverdale in 1909, plats numerous additions to the city, sees that roads are built and other infrastructure is in place. In early 1909 they take out a loan at Willapa Harbor State Bank to pay off one of their chief financial backers W. R. Marion, and by Sept. 1: “Went over to Mrs. Cagley’s in afternoon. Mamma’s house completed today. We are out of debt to the Willapa Harbor State Bank at last and the school district has cashed our warrant for the block between 9th, 10th, Duryea and Commercial.” Aug., 15, 1912: “Hard rain.... Leslie went So. B. again about taxes. Our tax on our home was $80 on $1,100 valuation last year. This year valuation raised to $10,000. Don’t know what will become of us.” Their concern about taxes can only be appreciated when measured in the light of their extensive land holdings. |
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Hanah Raymond, Stella, and friend Bessie. The woman behind Bessie is unidentified. |
Let’s party
Though Leslie has placed himself on an uphill track to success, slogging through interminable meetings and building projects, he usually comes home ready to be an amiable participant in whatever party or entertainment Stella has dreamed up. Dinner parties followed by cards or movies, and picnics or drives into the countryside are usually on tap. |
| That Stella in 2001
would have reveled in the successes of the Mariners, is a foregone conclusion.
On April 27, 1906, Leslie begins leveling a field on the Island for a city
baseball diamond and for several years, summer Saturdays and Sundays are
game days. She relishes every win of the Raymond team, usually registering
the score in her diary.
Sun., July 3, 1910: “Did not go to morning game until 9th inning. Raymond lost 4 to 9. Linda and Fred came in with me and we all had dinner at Hannah’s. Montesano won afternoon game 5 to 4. Umpire’s decisions rank. Many think he was paid. All supped here.” The 1910 team is extraordinary, and other than the suspicious losses to Monte, they chalk up victories almost every weekend. Sun., Sept. 4, 1910: “Went to ball game in morning. We won in the 9th after two struck out, 5 to 4. Dinner at Hannah’s. Mamma went to Seattle on 3:36 train. Tom drove her to depot. Rest of us went to ball game, 18 to 2 in our favor, then walked down town to get Chehalis returns....Montesano and Chehalis each took a game.” Mon., Sept. 5, 1910 (Labor Day): “Rain...In afternoon went to ball game. Began raining and Aberdeen tried to call it off in 4th inning, but our boys threw away last half so they played on, beat them 15 to 4. Crowd raised $100 to get them to play another game in place of one they protested, but they refused....so we get pennant.” Aside from baseball, summer activities are built around picnics in the ample Raymond orchards adjoining their home, card games that take up part of almost every day, “pick-up” ball games on the diamond on week nights, croquet and berry picking. Sat., July 17, 1909: “Showers. Mrs. Cagley and Mr. and Mrs. Safford brought their bedding, etc., before noon and Leslie and Mr. Safford took them across river in launch. All assembled here at 3:30 with pails and provisions. Went in launch, carried our loads up the hill and down to the tunnel ranch. Miss Brown with us. Made coffee on fireplace and our beds on the hay. Played cards until dark. Cagley came about 8 p.m.” Sun., July 18, 1909: “Sunny. Slept very well on our hay beds except when a horse came in and disturbed us. He seemed much interested in us. Breakfast of bacon, eggs and coffee cooked on fireplace was followed by a change of costume to overalls with all the pails we could muster. Went to berry patch to find them mostly green. Returned to ranch, got lunch, after resting in hay and riding horse. Coming home rode up river until 5. L and I went to picture show in evening.” In 1908 Stella and the growing army of housewives form a Thursday afternoon card club called initially the 500 club, 500 being a precursor to bridge. The club becomes more and more elaborate with first, consolation and booby prizes. Then in 1910 Stella and other ladies whose husbands are businessmen decided to form a Ladies Commercial Club and Stella notes, tongue firmly in cheek, Sat., Feb. 5, 1910: Mrs. McPhail and Mrs. Cagley went with me to the first meeting of Ladies Commerical Club at council room. All declined presidency save me. Of course, I am overjoyed!... Lectures, musical performances and moving picture shows make up much of Stella and Leslie’s outside entertainment and she lists attending a lecture by Father Couverette on Lincoln Day exercises in 1909, and a Hazeltine lecture on Peru in 1911 and dragooning Leslie into a weekend of opera in Portland in 1911. |
|
Tuesday Club, Spring Party. |
While Stella recognizes the importance of cultural activities and social organizations, she derives as much joy from simple relations with a greatly expanding group of friends. And starting in 1908, a frequent, simple and very fattening treat is used as an excuse at the drop of the hat for getting together with friends; ice cream. |
| Thur., Aug. 12, 1909: “Miss Brown came
up in the evening. Persuaded to go with us to the Band Dance at Finn
Hall. Big crowd. Had good time. Took Miss Brown home
and again had ice cream cones to make our homeward march happy.”
The luscious treat, which Leslie or friends would often bring home at the
end of the day had to be finished immediately, since there was no facility
for keeping it frozen. The ladies’ waistbands expanded with their
friendships.
While reading is often mentioned by Stella, she joins Mrs. Siler and Mrs. Cram in April of 1910 in giving a subscription to the Carnegie Library of $100 each. She says in January that she is reading “Lords of High Decision” by Meredith Nicholson 14 which she finishes two days later and blesses with her critique “Quite good.” She also reads aloud frequently to Leslie in the evening from Century magazine. Having an impact on the Raymond cultural scene, however, is the Tuesday Club which is formed in 1911 with a mission to study colonial history. Sept. 19, 1911: “Went with Mrs. Cagley and Wilson to first meeting on program of Tuesday Club at M. E. Hall. Twelve present: Mrs. Leach, Welsh, Welsh, Gailey, Reed, Swanson, Hamilton, Lewis, Heath and us three. Then we went and tried on hats.” The ladies meet faithfully, each taking their turn in presenting a paper at their monthly meetings before seeking solace in cake, coffee and gossip. With the development of a more formal social class, Stella is increasingly wary of one member of the Tuesday Club, Mrs. J. J. Haggerty, wife of the president of the Raymond Trust Co. In 1909, she has joined at Mrs. Haggerty’s request in organizing a reception for the newly married Mrs. H. W. MacPhail. Sept. 2, 1909: Bride arrived in good order at Mrs. Haggerty’s. Prof. North the only “he” person in sight. Played continuously. Everything went smoothly, but such a bore. A week later the reception and Stella’s involvement in it are tarnished when she reveals: Sept. 10 Hear that Florence Haggerty (the Haggerty daughter) sent uncomplimentary postals to reception guests. Incensed, Stella calls at the Haggerty home the next day, but Mrs. Haggerty is conveniently out. Thereafter the ladies circle each other cautiously, with Stella putting any distance she can between herself and the Haggertys despite their necessary business interactions. At one Tuesday Club meeting hosted by the Haggertys in 1913, Florence proudly escorts club members around their new mansion (later purchased by lumber mill owner C. L. Lewis, and even later known for many years as the Tracey Apartments at 526 May Street. It is now owned by Ed Norman.) The house is undoubtedly Raymond’s finest in 1913. 15 Stella reacts with unaccustomed vehemence in 1913 when she learns that Mrs. Haggerty has committed the Tuesday Club to hosting the state Federation of Women’s Clubs in 1914. Sat., 21: “Took Clara down in evening to see fat women and snakes (at her request). Got my hat. Got the “glad tidings” last night that Mrs. Conway and Mrs. Swanson had secured State Federation for Raymond next year. Damn!” Stella’s objection is not to the convention, but the money it will cost the club, which barely has enough to support itself. She and other members loyally put their energies toward developing fundraisers for obtaining the money. Bake sales, dance lessons, parties, card parties, dinner parties, musicales are given. It would be pure understatement to say that Stella is not disappointed when Haggerty’s bank fails in September of 1914 and charges subsequently brought against him, followed by him and his family fleeing south, his eventual capture, conviction and sentencing to one year at Walla Walla. In addition to the Tuesday Club, and invitations to attend the Propylaeum Club in South Bend with Mrs. Leach, another club forms and takes social precedence at least for a time. Though she doesn’t name it, it is the Thursday evening card club with husbands invited. What begins as four or five tables of card players, slips into high gear on Thurs., Nov. 2, 1911, when Stella writes: “We walked over to Hyman’s in evening. Last to arrive. Very elaborately entertained. I walked up the train of the hostess’s Paris gown. Came home in auto. My turn next and it is surely hard to follow Mrs. Hyman.” Though Stella doesn’t relate how she compares the next week, she may have decided to bring the level of entertainment back to a more practical scale for she notes the day before that she made white and brown breads, cakes and cooked her chicken, and the next day made final preparations at some leisure. A week later Mrs. Hyman and others are floating the idea of a Thanksgiving dance and Stella says: Nov. 11, 1911: “They want to make it too small to suit our unexclusive ideas.” We never learn if the dance is even held because just four days later Leslie becomes very ill with appendicitis and for more than two months is fighting fevers and infections. |
|
| Health concerns
Though both Raymond and South Bend have hospitals in the first decade, illness and injury are dangerous, indeed. With no antibiotics, intravenous feeding, and few pain medications, many lives are dramatically changed and shortened by seemingly minor illnesses or injuries. Fri., Nov. 27, 1908: “Cooked chicken, salad dressing and dessert for tomorrow night. Leslie went to tunnel. Nora came home in afternoon. Said Warren (her eldest brother) was the man hurt yesterday. Struck on neck by log cable.” On Dec. 1 they have brought Warren to the hospital to be operated on. In evening we went down and saw pieces of bone that were removed from his neck. About ten of them... Dec. 8, 1908: “Jesse Paulding came up in afternoon, said Warren died about 1:30 quietly. Rode down on wheel and got goods to face Nora’s skirt. Later went down with Jesse to get Nora’s hat, flowers, etc.” Death never fails to shock Stella for she records every passing faithfully in her diaries from Josie Bush who dies in childbirth in early 1909 to Carl Shahour on Mar. 20, to Frank Parsell’s baby boy on June 14, 1909 to Horace Clark’s death on Aug. 18, followed swiftly by Cora Clark on Aug. 30, 1909. Summer picnics present the danger of ptomaine poisoning with some mention of tummy aches and cramps on days that follow; but no single illness is quite so fearful as one that comes to Raymond in late August of 1910. Mrs. Gailey 16 stops Stella on one of her drives with Billy through Riverdale to complain that there has been no quarantine of a home across the street from her house that was visited by death attributed to diphtheria on Aug. 25, 1910. That early death is just the beginning of what later is described as infantile paralysis. On Sept. 3, Johnny Johnson’s older child dies of the disease later known as polio, the next day Mrs. Gailey’s daughter, Josephine, herself dies in the Overmeyer Hospital of what is called peritonitis, but later it is admitted she had contracted infantile paralysis. On Sept. 5, Mrs. Ireland Sr. dies, Ruby Monohon dies in Portland, Mrs. Scott McKenzie dies as does another child and Stella describes wild rumors of cases of infantile paralysis. As suddenly as the disease appears, however, it vanishes. Though she and Leslie have no children, Stella is intensely interested in babies and crochets a cap for the coming birth by her friend Bess Cagley in mid-1911. The cap, which she admits is “big enough to fit Mr. Little,” is never to be used by a Cagley, however. May 4, 1911: “Mrs. Lewis called Leslie up and said Mrs. Cagley had given birth to twin babies, both dead, at 4 a.m. Learned later one had been dead since 5 months....” On May 15, 1911, Mamma shows Stella a growth on her head. Looks very bad. June 14, 1911: “The growth on Mamma’s head came off today. She and Tom think because of treatments by faith cure healer. Am rejoiced that it is gone at any rate.” Stella has her own method for curing the common cold. Rarely does she stay in and drink liquids and rest. Instead she fasts; in 1911 going on a seven day fast during which she eats nothing and drinks only water and coffee, she loses 12 pounds and finally the cold goes away. “Rather long for a juicy steak,” she says the day before she begins to drink broth and eat mashed potatoes. In 1912 she and her friend Bess Cagley decide to go on a fast together and she registers their weight at the start: 198 and 192 pounds respectively. Four days later they give in to hunger and weigh themselves. Mrs. Cagley has lost one half pound and Stella is down to 189; three pounds. In October of 1911 illness befalls Mrs. MacPhail, wife of banker, H. W. MacPhail. With a fever of 104½, Mrs. MacPhail is described as “very low.” Then her husband brings in a doctor from Portland, Dr. Rockey, who consults with local doctors and operates. Within three days she is recovering. Within a few months Dr. Rockey is to become a secondary figure in Leslie’s illness, which begins on Nov. 16, 1911: “Leslie complained of pain in pit of stomach in afternoon, but ate supper and went to office.” By Nov. 17, 1911, however, Leslie cannot ignore his advancing illness. He is vomiting, has a “dreadful chill that shook the room almost” and a rising temperature. For the next two weeks, Stella cares only for Leslie, and Dr. Barkman, their family doctor calls in Dr. Mathieu from South Bend, to consult. Both are very anxious. Mathieu is recommending an operation but Barkman is advising against it because he fears an abscess, which he can feel on Leslie’s appendix, will burst, spreading infection throughout his body. Tues., Nov. 21, 1911: “Bad night last night. Temperature. Made me lie on edge of bed. Then wanted sheets and gown changed because of fumes from alcohol bath. Wanted to move upstairs because of dust from water tower this A.M.” Fri., Nov. 24, 1911: “Pain in appendix increased all day. Both doctors again at 5 p.m. Think it will be necessary to operate Sunday morning. Two hours after they left, he passed urine and gas and felt much better. Dr. Barkman danced when he came in evening. MacPhail came over and talked to me about doctors., etc. George went over in evening and talked to him (MacPhail).” Sat., Nov. 25, 1911: “Leslie seems better. Mamma came in afternoon. Dr. Barkman hopes no operation will be necessary. Mrs. Cagley, Wilson and Iveson sent things to eat.” Sun., 26: “Cool. Leslie about same as yesterday. Dr. Mathieu called, said he was making a good fight. He takes no nourishment. Dr. Barkman did not come in evening. First time.” Wed., Nov. 29, 1911: “Max 100.6, pulse 86. Asked Dr. Barkman to bring Dr. Mathieu again in evening. He again thought operation necessary. They decided to wait two or three days; if he got better in meantime they would not operate, but if he got worse or did not change they would. I had my cry after I went to bed with Mamma. He seemed to have stoppage and cramps.” Thurs., Nov. 30, 1911: “THANKSGIVING, LESLIE BETTER. ....had good night, max temperature 98.8, pulse 70.” Sun., Dec. 3, 1911: “Normal temperature. Dr. Mathieu paid friendly call in afternoon and acknowledged that Dr. Barkman was right about abscess absorbing. Said the Pearsons in S.B. had lost their baby.” Leslie continues, with some ups and downs, to recover with one major setback mid month when his temperature rises to 99.4 and his pulse skyrockets to 98. However, rest appears to deal with many of his pains and they celebrate Christmas with family members shuttling between their home and Hannah’s, with Ruth decorating Stella’s tree Dec. 24 and all family members opening presents there, and dining at Hannah’s the next day. Though Leslie is prohibited by the doctor from going the two blocks, plenty of food makes the rounds anyway. Tues., Dec. 26, 1911: “...(Leslie) talks of going to Florida via Panama....” Thur., Dec. 28, 1911: “...Leslie put on hat and overcoat first time and walked out to tank, stable and poultry yard...The die apparently is cast: there will be an operation as soon as Leslie’s condition stabilizes. Though he is regaining strength rapidly there are small setbacks with racing pulses and rising temperatures. Stella is putting her confinement at home to good use, however, sewing several dresses and repairing others. On Jan. 4, 1912, she reports Letter from Mrs. Gaylord (mother of Howard Gaylord, Leslie’s good friend in Portland). Invites me to stay with them while we are in town for Leslie’s operation....Water is filling the concrete tank for city use tonight.” |
Stella Raymond and Bess Cagley (right) ready for a dip in the chilly Willapa on a sunny day in November, 1918. |
On Jan. 15, the Raymonds receive
Dr. Barkman’s bill; for $100. Tues., Jan. 16, 1912: “I began
packing. Leslie rode bike downtown in P.M. Saw Barkman.
Gave him check for $150. (Barkman) said he would like to be present
if Rockey operates on Leslie....”
Stella buys a steamer trunk and packs for an absence of several months. Thurs., Jan 18, 1912: “Left home on 7 a.m. train. Regular engineers in small pox quarantine at S.B....” The Raymonds arrive in Portland and learn Dr. Wilson has gone to Panama and Dr. Rockey and Coffey are not yet back from Paris. Sat., Jan. 20: “Went with Leslie to see Dr. Sabin. He advised operation. Said Leslie’s appendix was like a stick of dynamite...We went to Orpheum in evening.” Mon., Jan 22, 1912: “Went with Leslie to Mr. Basey’s office in morning. They decided to go together to Dr. Sheldon’s office at 2:30. I arrived at Sheldon’s after he had made examination. He wanted to operate tomorrow morning at 9....” Tues., Jan. 23, 1912: “...I had cot in Leslie’s room (407) on 4th floor. This morning Howard came at nine but operation was dated for 12 so he went back and came again at noon. Leslie went to sleep at 11. They dressed him in operating garb and took him away about 1:30. Then ensued an anxious two hours or more. Howard stayed until incision was made then was put out and helped me...Leslie held out arms and cried, “Stella, Stella, Stella” when consciousness first returned. Howard phoned George.” |
| Recovery is rapid
and after 18 days and two setbacks when his temperature increases indicating
infection, Leslie is dismissed from the hospital. Stella at first
carries his meal trays to their bedroom at the Gaylord house, but Dr. Sheldon
immediately discourages that, saying Leslie can certainly go down for his
meals. Each day the doctor comes and dresses his wound and on Feb.
13 says Leslie can get out in a few days. The next day Stella and
Leslie go to the Orpheum matinee. Twelve days later, Feb. 25, they
board the Southern Pacific with tickets to New Orleans and reservations
on the Cartago, a steamer bound for Panama. Leslie after six years
of working with his eyes only on one goal line, shifts his priorities and
decides it’s time they have some fun.
It is a true “busman’s” holiday; 72 days in duration, packed with tours of San Francisco, San Antonio, New Orleans, Costa Rica, Panama, Cuba, Key West, Florida, St. Augustine, Chicago, Denver and concludes with a medical checkup in Portland on Fri., May 3, 1912. Leslie takes time in several cities to visit city water filtration plants. The trip has taken them away from the stresses of community building and restored a balance in their marriage. As they catch the 7:10 a.m. train for home on May 6 she writes: Dreading to get there. Long wait at Chehalis. Tom, Hannah, Ruth, Mr. Jeffress, Mrs. Wilson, Mrs. Cagley met us. Came up in auto. Hannah got dinner here then they went home. Their new house well underway. While Stella and Leslie have no children, they do have each other and their town. That this is enough, is apparent in Stella’s many entries, not of parties and card games or even picnics, but rather in the Sunday afternoon buggy rides they take, usually to view progress on the tunnel, the dams, the pumping station and other projects. When the press of business keeps Leslie tied to his desk and projects, Stella takes matters into her own hands, walks down to the office and waits. They walk home together. Sun., July 10, 1910: “Still hot. Ruth and Tom went to Tokeland to meet Mamma. Leslie and I drove out towards Bloomhardts, unharnessed Bill and laid down in woods. Came back about 1 and went swimming with Cagleys, napped, supped at George’s, went for launch ride. Tom and Ruth did not find Mamma.” Wed., Mar. 30, 1910: “Light rain. Leslie went out to Miller and Monohon ranches with a man named Miller. Got home about 3 p.m. Ate a bite. Lingered until about 5:30 talking his water plans to me....” Oct., 4, 1911: “Had Mrs. Cagley, Conway and Wilson over to play bridge in afternoon. In evening Hannah, Ruth and I went to show. Looked through councilroom windows as we passed and did Leslie the honor of thinking him handsomer than Kilbourne, Cathcart, Shumway, Welsh or Elwood.” In December 1912, Leslie and Stella begin preparing very special Christmas presents for several friends. Leslie spends several nights in a home darkroom, printing pictures of their trip to Panama. Stella takes favorite negatives to Edwards in South Bend to have them enlarged. In the evenings, she pastes Leslie’s prints into photo albums. Then on Tues., Dec. 17, 1912: “Hannah and Mrs. Cagley went to So. Bend, I went to Mrs. Berglein’s about 4 and then went downtown. Went with Leslie to Larson and Wahlen’s; looked at diamonds and LaVollieres and bought presents for Nora and Linda. Had dinner at Wakefield....” Wed., Dec. 18, 1912: “Mrs. Cagley came over and helped me in morning and came early in afternoon and we made our sandwiches. Had about 24 ladies. Cagley’s, Hannah, Ruth and Father R. had supper with us afterward and played auction. Leslie gave me diamond ring.” Sat., Dec. 21, 1912: “Finished the Kodak books. Made a Christmas cake for Alex. Edward’s sent home my enlarged and colored pictures, two of tower at Old Panama, one of bridge, one of Peace Tree and one of Old Panama Ruins. One for Mamma, two for Leslie, one for Hannah and one for Mrs. Wilson....” Sun., Dec. 22, 1912: “Leslie and I finished and wrapped our Kodak books. Drove Bill down to office, weighed, addressed and mailed them....” Leslie, however, has one more surprise; they are to repeat the journey of fifteen years earlier in 1897 when they boarded the train from Westport for Portland to be married but were marooned in Oakville by a storm and married by a helpful minister who was located by the train conductor. Mon., Dec. 29, 1912: “Great storm. Fifteenth anniversary of wedding and an exact duplicate as to weather. Got ready to go to Portland, then went to Hannah’s to dinner, Cagleys too. They had cut glass flower basket for us. Went to train, then decided too much danger of washouts. Got in auto and went back to Geo’s.” So there they are, an “old married couple” not caught up in the romance of the moment, choosing the practical alternative. They go in comfort the next day. |
|
| The 1916 Trip
It may have been articles in the newspapers trumpeting the auto industry’s intention to see cars drive from the Atlantic to the Pacific that put it into Leslie’s, and Stella’s, heads. Always intrepid travelers and with three years driving experience behind them, they begin laying plans; and their route across America to begin at the end of May. The industry was signing up couples who would race their cars over predetermined routes in a kind of relay, and it is not known from Stella’s diary whether they had hopes of being part of the relay. Unlikely since they take a deliberate and slow, by today’s standards, journey discovering their country; perhaps at too close a vantage point at times. Their leave-taking is a real event in Raymond, with friends honoring them with dinner parties and with going-away gifts. Signaling how dangerous their trip is considered, the couple make out their wills the day before they leave. They have turned over their CarterCar to George and his family, teaching George how to drive before they leave. Their new car is a Franklin and in addition to road maps, they have addresses in several cities for the Franklin dealer, should they need repairs. They do, though for the most part the breakdowns don’t come when they are conveniently near a dealer. Their first stop, naturally, is Portland, where they spend four days dining and saying farewell to their friends, the Gaylords and Stannards. They depart Portland June 1, 1916. The first day out, they blow a tire on top of a steep grade. Two days later, they need to have the emergency brake fixed and the same day a leaky valve repaired. Suggesting that there is not an over abundance of hotels for America’s motorists are Stella’s notations that they very frequently camp at the side of a road, behind a school, in a farmer’s field, by a river’s edge. Portland, Echo, Lagrande, Huntington, Bliss, (ID) Strevell. Wed., June 7: “Strevell to Salt Lake. Left the hotel at Strevell about 9 a.m. Ate luncheon at Tremonton. The country as we neared Salt Lake became much more prosperous and fertile hills replaced the sagebrush. We stopped at Ogden and had a sundae. Arrived at the Hotel Utah about 6:30. Speedometer stood at 2,097 when we left Strevell....Germany and Britain have had a Naval Battle. Kitchener drowned and Yuan Shi Kai died while we have been spinning along with small time newspapers and Rep. and Progressive conventions on in Chicago....” Sun., June 11: “Rock Springs to Carbon. We are snugly stowed in the car for the night with a high wind blowing and rain threatening. Are under the lee of a bluff nine miles East of Hanna, a coal camp where we dined. Left Rock Springs 9:45 this morning. Made our own luncheon in the desert. Drove one hundred miles without passing but two autos and two wagons. Drove 159 miles by speedometer....” Carbon, Kimball, Brule, Brady, NB. They encounter their first serious motor problem and delay at Brady, Nebraska, on June 14 when they find the shaft to the differential is broken. An accommodating young farmer tows them to Brady where they spend one “long, tiresome day” so by the next day, as they wait for a new shaft to arrive, they take the train to Lexington, NE, where Stella begins making friends, as usual, and, sews, goes to picture shows, receives mail and waits for eight more days with Leslie traveling back and forth to Brady. Apparently, his theory is that the part will arrive more quickly if he’s on the scene. |
| Lexington, Kearney, Omaha, Woodbine
(Iowa), Belle Plaine. June 27: “Iowa is more lovely than Nebraska
because of low hills. All land under cultivation and many trees.
Had good noon meal at Jefferson. And the rottenest one at a fine
looking cafe in the pretty town of Marshalltown - so bad Leslie told the
cashier what he thought of it and that was something new for him.”
Chicago, LaPorte, Ind., Cleveland, Chautauqua, N.Y., Niagara Falls, Buffalo, Syracuse. Here they stop because there is a Franklin factory there and they need repairs. They now are checking the Blue Book, apparently an early AAA-type guide, for hotels and finally choose one run by the Mizpah, Combined Baptist Church and Hotel. After two days of touring the town, Leslie comes back with the news that three cylinders may need boring and new pistons. Meanwhile the Mizpahs are getting on their nerves; too many Christian endeavors...” and she begins to find other restaurants, the movie theaters, a stock company theater. Six days later, they are on the road again. Utica, Albany , Pittsfield, Lenox and finally Winchendon, Mass; one of two goals on their trip; Leslie’s home town which he has not visited since he left at the age of 15, 26 years earlier. July 17: Winchendon. “Leslie went out in A.M. Found Judge Spatter and some of his old schooolmates. Norris Clark only one who recognized him. After luncheon took me to Mrs. John Gay’s. She and her sister Miss Merril live together. While we were there, their niece Mary Parker came and went with us for a ride to the cemetery, Lake Denison, Waterville, etc. In the evening we looked up the Frank Cheneys, Leslie’s cousin who invited us to visit them....” They spend one more day in Winchendon, then leave for New Hampshire, there to visit Leslie’s cousin Albert Thayer who directed them on to East Alstead. “Found (Albert) Thayer’s father. Leslie’s Uncle Henry, aged 77 and a house keeper aged 80 living on the tip top of a hill even Aziz (the name they have bestowed on their Franklin) wouldn’t climb. Leaving there they head for Bellows Falls, Vermont to visit another cousin, then to Keene NH to look up Fannie Thayer, “the last of the cousins.” After another day in Winchendon, they start-off again in Aziz for Hamburg, Concord, stopping to see the battlefield and the home of Louisa Alcott, Lexington, Cambridge. The next day they are in Boston where more Raymond relatives are visited including a brother of Father Raymond, Frank Raymond, who is living in a rest home. “Resemblance to latter made it seem kind of spooky.” Finding bedbugs in their “nice little hotel,” the Raymonds leave Boston hurriedly and head for New Bedford and after a day in Madison, Conn., where they wind up the Raymond visits with one final aunt, then head for Tarrytown, N.Y., ancestral home of the Pauldings, Stella’s great grandfather. They get there late but Stella stalwartly stands in the rain and copies the inscription at the base of her great grandfather’s statue: “On this spot, on the 23rd day of September, 1780, the spy Major John Andre, Adjutant General of the British Army was captured by John Paulding, David Williams and Isaac Van Wart, all natives of this county. History has told the rest. The people of Westchester county have erected this monument as well to commemorate a great event as to testify to their high estimation of that integrity and patriotism which rejecting every temptation rescued the United States from most imminent peril by baffling the arts of a spy and the plots of a traitor. Dedicated October 7th, 1853.” |
| Peekskill and Long Island.
Near Peekskill they find a shirttail Paulding relative who took us to see
the monument of John Paulding’s grave erected by N.Y. and to the 400 acre
farm given him by the state; now for sale for $100,000. After leaving
Mrs. Armstrong at her home we lunched at Ossining, came through N.Y. City,
crossed Queensboro Bridge to Long Island, dined at Oyster Bay and slept
in car near there. They have crossed the nation and waded in the
waters of the Atlantic Ocean.
They spend the next three days touring the Big Apple then two days in Philadelphia visiting relatives of friends they had met on their 1912 cruise to Panama then head for Mt. Vernon where in a bit of travel whimsy they find Frank Nixon, his wife and nieces waiting by their car at the Mt. Vernon gate. They tour the nation’s capital for a day then leave for Gettysburg with Nixon in the lead. Stella notes with some astonishment that he (Nixon) hit her up to 40 miles at times. By the next day in Pittsburg, they found they couldn’t keep up with the Nixons; their brake bands had worn out. Lisbon, Mansfield, Hicksville, Niles, Hammond, Chicago, Madison, Wis. Sun., 13: Kilbourne, Wis. “This is the day it happened. We left Madison about nine this morning for Minneapolis via LaCrosse and left the main road to come to Kilbourne and the Dells of Wisconsin. At Delton on a rather steep crooked grade we stuck fresh oil and skidded into the ditch, overturning. We were both under the car but the ditch was deep and top of luggage kept car off us. We crawled out of the door and a little later noticed Leslie’s trousers bloody. Had quite bad gash around knee. Sauk city people just behind us offered to bring us in to doctor. Got some things out of car which was now afire. Emptied our fire extinguisher to no purpose. Came in and Dr. took eight stitches in his leg. Had dinner and then same people took us back. Scene smoldered all day. Car was righted and fire out when we returned but full of sand - wiring burned, steering wheel broken. Were towed in here and wired Lewis and Reed. Will be here until insurance is adjusted then home by rail.” They get the run around from their insurance company for seven days before Leslie decides to have the Franklin shipped back. They pass through North Dakota before arriving at Yellowstone Park where they have arranged for a five-day break seeing the geysers, the Upper Basin, Old Faithful Inn, Yellowstone Lake and are entertained almost nightly by grizzly bears foraging through the garbage dumps. They re-board their west bound train and two days later buy a Tacoma newspaper and find they aren’t the only unfortunate travelers from Raymond. The Nixons have wrecked their car in Maysville, Mo., and Mrs. Nixon’s nose is broken. The trip has lived up to the dire warnings they had shrugged off during their planning stages; they have weathered thunderstorms, hail storms, accidents, breakdowns and bedbugs and returned home with their adventurous, happy outlooks intact. With 1916 Stella all but ends her regular diary keeping, sensing perhaps that an era has just ended for her personally and for the city in which she and Leslie have invested their capital, initiative and endurance. 17 She makes just two entries in an old ledger in 1921, one in 1922, and then on Jan. 30, 1923, she writes: “....With middle age upon us I hope we can have some investments that will secure old age since our real estate is so discouraging because of overtaxation. These are such happy days, it seems too bad that this happy early afternoon of life could not last longer.” |
Footnotes
|
Members of the Raymond Foundation board: standing, from left, President Ron Brummel, member Dr. Jeff Nevitt, member Dick Mergens; seated from left, secretary Karen Clements and member Sue Bale. |
Appendix
Raymond Foundation Leslie and Stella Raymond’s gift to the city named for them can only be regarded as its crowning glory and a sturdy bulwark against the vicissitudes of a shrunken regional economy. Many hundreds of students, a dozen local churches, and uncounted good causes have been sustained by income from a trust fund set aside after the Raymonds died forty years ago. |
| Total payments for the years 1969 through
2000 total $1,531,000, but the original fund has never been touched.
President Ron Brummel will say only that the trust is “worth more than a million” and that his board’s present intention remains what it has been for more than forty years; to avoid dipping into principal. He acknowledges that the Foundation, conservatively managed by the Bank of America (formerly Seafirst Bank), has not been entirely immune from shrinkage in stock prices over the last year or so. Income reserves accumulated in earlier years have so far enabled the board to avoid curtailment of established distribution levels. Serving with Brummel, owner of Raymond Drug Co., on the Raymond Foundation board are Sue Bale, an aide at Raymond School District; Karen Clements, vice president-treasurer at Raymond Federal Savings Bank; Richard Mergens, retired business and public utility district manager; and Dr. Jeffrey S. Nevitt, owner of the Pacific Eye Clinic. Mrs. Clements, appointed to the board in 1991 and currently its secretary-treasurer, is the second woman named to the board, the other being Huldamay Giesy Buell, one of the original appointees. Altogether, fourteen persons have served on the Raymond Foundation board. Others were John M. Weir, Dr. Lester Owens, James H. Murphy, Jack Titcomb, Raymond Meredith, Edwin C. Martell, Frank Peeples and Oscar Holm. Scholarships are the most visible philanthropy of the Foundation and in the 1969-2000 period amounted to $551,000, slightly less than the $602,000 provided to local charitable organizations. President Brummel said Raymond High School graduates may apply for academic scholarships if they have a 3.0 grade average at RHS, and for vocational scholarships if they have a 2.0 GPA. He could recall only one instance in his ten years on the board when that requirement was not strictly enforced, and then in compelling circumstances. Need, achievement and leadership are other elements in the selection process. Certain charities (or non-profit community organizations) which operate both in Raymond and in other areas of the county have received support by the Foundation. These include the Pacific County Fair, Willapa Harbor Hospital and the Pacific County Historical Society. However, groups operating in only Willapa Valley or South Bend are ineligible. Donations of $218,000 to youth programs and $141,000 to local churches completed the Foundation’s philanthropy in the 1969-2000 period. President Brummel is unaware of any other smaller towns in the state which have available a community philanthropy similar to the Raymond Foundation. “I feel quite honored to serve on the board,” he said. “You should see the smiles on our members’ faces when they leave an award meeting. It makes Raymond a better place.” |
|
Ray Meredith |
Ray Meredith’s memories of Leslie and Stella Raymond
One of the original directors of the Raymond Foundation, Ray Meredith remains the city’s closest link to Leslie and Stella Raymond, for whom he was named eighty-one years ago by his parents, Clarke and Frances Meredith, long time friends of the Raymonds. Ray Meredith discussed his relationship with Leslie and Stella Raymond in an interview by reporter Theresa Willeford-Hathaway several years ago: “The Raymonds were neighbors of ours. We lived on the Island part of Raymond, as it is called. Our house was about two blocks away from the one the Raymonds lived in, and I think my parents bought our lot from them. The Raymonds platted the town to sell land. They owned half the town, and Leslie was the first postmaster. “I remember going to their house for dinner. They didn’t have a large house and they weren’t pretentious in any way, despite the wealth I believe they had. In addition to having a lot of property, they owned the water system. |
| Tower Street on The Island is named after
the water tower that is still standing there.
“He (L. V.) was kind of quiet. He was quite a bicycle rider. That was his hobby as a young man and he used to talk about racing bicycles. He spoke of racing from San Francisco to Portland. I could tell they were fond memories for him. “Stella, she was the daughter of local pioneers. Her father was a sea captain. She was very friendly and approachable. She and Leslie were both nice people, but kind of a contrast. She was a tall, big woman. I believe she was taller than her husband. Leslie was a slight man. And he was pretty quiet, while she was very outgoing. “My father worked in a bank, the Willapa Harbor State Bank, which closed during the Depression. My parents had four children and my father was out of a job. Then the man who ran the variety store (a Mr. Darling) died and my parents took over the store. “Leslie or I guess I called him Mr. Raymond as a child, was a perfect gentleman at all times. He never flaunted his wealth, or showed off about anything. I do remember he had cars, including a Franklin. That was a type of car they had in those days. That was quite impressive to me. In those days during the Depression, not many people had cars. We didn’t at the time. But neither Leslie nor Stella put on airs, despite all the things they had and the fact they were prominent people in town. They were friendly with everybody. “The Raymonds had a cottage at Long Beach, and they often invited us to join them. We would spend part of our holidays and vacations there. Visiting them at the beach, we would go clamming and catch crabs on the beach. We’d take walks, hiking along a trail to the beach and out to the jetty by the North Head lighthouse, and back. L. V. would have his pockets full of chocolate bars that he would pass out to the children. “He was generous to kids, giving us things we loved like candy bars. That’s something you remember from your childhood. You have to remember that these were the Depression years, and kids weren’t given things like that very often. So it was quite a treat. “As I said, Stella was a very bubbly, friendly woman, and a natural hostess. Stella loved to play cards, mostly pinochle and bridge. My parents did too. You have to remember, this was back before television, and everyone did a lot of card playing back then. A funny thing, Stella was the first woman I ever saw smoking. “I kind of lost contact with the Raymonds when I moved away. Their graves are at Fern Hill Cemetery in Menlo, and they had set up a foundation to go into effect after they died. That was a wonderful thing for them to do. I didn’t know anything about it when they were alive, but I was quite touched and pleased when I found out the Raymonds’ will requested that I sit on the board. “Others who were chosen for the board were beloved Dr. Lester H. Owens, a dentist, also Huldamay Giesy Buell, John Weir and Jack Titcomb. I think Weyerhaeuser Co. wanted him on the board. I believe the will said that Weyerhaeuser should choose a person for the board. “I was on the Foundation board for quite a while, and served as its president for a time. The Raymond Foundation has helped projects and people in the community quite a bit. It gives money to most of the charities. I know it purchased a lot of equipment for the hospital in South Bend, and it gave a lot of funding to the school. I believe most of the money has been spent in the Raymond area. It has provided quite a few students with scholarships. |
|
| “It was natural I guess that
the Raymonds would leave something like that for the area. L. V.
was always active on various boards, and belonged to things like the Chamber
of Commerce and so forth. He always showed a lot of interest in the
area, and Stella helped set up the public library in Raymond.
“The Raymonds never had any children, but both during their lives, and afterwards through the Foundation, they helped a lot of children; and a lot of adults, too. When they were alive, they did things anonymously. They would find out about somebody who needed help, and they would quietly give them some assistance. They helped a lot of kids to get through school. They suggested some things in their wills about how the Foundation money should be spent, with specific emphasis on education. “The Raymonds left some parcels of land, but most of what they left was in conservative stocks and bonds. Luckily, it went into trusts. Seafirst Bank does the investing and handles the taxes for a fee. That was the way it was when I was on it, and I assume it is still that way. I am proud to have sat on the board of the Foundation, and pleased at how the good work of the Foundation is ongoing. And I am proud to have known the Raymonds. They were great people.” Ray Meredith was graduated from Raymond High School in 1938 and that fall entered the University of Washington, where he earned a BA degree in business administration in 1942. As soon as he was graduated from UW he entered the Marine Corps to attend officer candidate school at Quantico, VA. After being commissioned a second lieutenant, he went to the Pacific theater where he participated in the Marine landings on New Britain, Peleliu and Okinawa, but was never wounded. He had been advanced to the rank of major and was home on leave when Japan surrendered in September 1945. He recalls his relief at being spared more combat, “There had been too much killing, I’m not sure I could have stood any more.” Soon discharged and without any other career plans, Ray joined the family variety store in Raymond and within a year or so took over the business on the retirement of his father. Barely 25 but with a college education and three years of war behind him, he was well established in the comfortable routine of a small town merchant. “Every morning I would unlock the door, turn on the lights, open the mail, and go over to Bridges for coffee.” Ray needed more of a challenge. Capitalizing on the growing popularity of Hallmark greeting cards, Ray and his brother John opened 15 more greeting card and gift shops around the state, and in 1964 Ray and his family moved to Olympia, which was more centrally located within their retail chain. However, for many years he maintained ties to Raymond through directorships of the Raymond Foundation, Raymond Federal Savings and Loan Association, and Harbor Community Bank, where he was among the founders. In 1984, he sold the Raymond store to an employee, and since then has also disposed of his interests in all the other stores except the one at Capital Mall in Olympia. Ray’s wife Jeanne died in 1998 after 48 years of marriage. Their children are Janet Keach, Ann Johnson, Todd Meredith and Rev. Mark Meredith. Ray also has eight grandchildren. Rev. Meredith, a Covenant Church pastor in Anchorage, Alaska, officiated at the marriage in May, 2001, of his father and the former Jane Schafer of Olympia. Ray and Jane Meredith reside in Olympia and Palm Desert, CA. |
Raymond’s manufacturing plants and capacities *
*A tabulation prepared by the Raymond Commercial Club, probably in 1912. In 2001, the only mill remaining in Raymond is the one operated by Weyerhaeuser Co. Human Resources Manager Gary Salme estimates that daily shift production on a comparable basis is 145,000 feet. Two shifts were in operation in the summer of 2001. |
Raymond, Washington, on the South Fork of the Willapa River in 1907. |
