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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. |
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| 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. |
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| Stewart Holbrook’s portrait of Raymond |
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| 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. |
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“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. |
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| 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. |
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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 w | |