Chehalis ( ) is a city in and the county seat of Lewis County, Washington, United States. The population was 7,439 at the time of the 2020 census.
The city is located in the Chehalis valley and is split by Interstate 5 (I-5) and State Route 6. It is twinned with the bordering city of Centralia. The communities of Napavine and Newaukum lie directly south, with the town of Adna to the west. Due to the community's location on the Chehalis River, and the nearby confluences of the Newaukum and Skookumchuck rivers, the city has experienced several historic flooding events during its history.
Incorporated in 1883, Chehalis was primarily a logging and railroad town, with a shift towards farming in the mid-20th century. The city has bolstered its economy in the 21st century with a focus in manufacturing and warehousing.
Chehalis is home to the historic neighborhood of Claquato, the Chehalis–Centralia Airport, and the Southwest Washington Fairgrounds. The city has several distinct historical areas and boasts 11 locations on the list of National Register of Historic Places, more than any other region in Lewis County. Several museums that highlight motorcycles, veterans and military history, and the Chehalis history of railroads are located within the city limits. Chehalis contains approximately of parks, most begun by land donations and are overseen by volunteer community efforts. The community is known locally for its annual summer event, ChehalisFest.
The city anchors the beginning trailhead for the Willapa Hills Trail and accommodates riders during the Seattle to Portland Bicycle Classic. Chehalis once was home to a championship minor league baseball team and often welcomed barnstorming ballclubs and competitions featuring teams from Negro league baseball.
In the 21st century, Chehalis initiated several charity, volunteer, and local government sponsored groups to revitalize the city, with focus on renovations to its historic downtown district, the upgrading of the community's transit sector, and increasing the education and graduation rate within the school district. Additional efforts of improvements were led via art programs and renovations to its parks.
Etymology
The name "Chehalis", pronounced , is derived from ', the name of a principal village of the Lower Chehalis people, located near what is now Westport, Washington. It translates to "place of sand" or "shifting sand" in English. It has also been spelled Atchixe-lish, Chachelis, Checalish, Chehaylis, Chickeelas, Chixeelis, Ebihalis, Tcheles, Tsehalish, and Tse-he-lis. Early non-native explorers of the Pacific Northwest vocalized the words as "Chehalis" and proceeded to describe the original inhabitants as such.
The community was originally known as Saunder's Bottom and as the town of Saundersville, named after Schuyler and Eliza Saunders on whose donation land claim it was founded when they settled on the land in 1850. Differing timelines and recognition of the name change to Chehalis exist. A founding member of the community and its postmaster, Obadiah B. McFadden, renamed the town as Chehalis in 1870. Another account claims officials for the Northern Pacific Railroad, in 1874, began to refer to the location as Chehalis but for unknown reasons. The naming was officially recognized by the state legislature on September 23, 1879. The Chehalis nomenclature is believed to denote its location to the Chehalis people and the Chehalis River.
Motto and nickname
An early motto for the city, "What Chehalis makes makes Chehalis" was initiated under Mayor John West in late-1926. As red roses had long been a symbol of the community, including the All-America Rose Selections (AARS) accredited Chehalis Municipal Rose Garden, the city adopted the red rose as an official community flower in 1955, leading to the nickname for Chehalis, "The Rose City", which was made official in 2000. The city's motto, "A Heritage to be Proud Of" was concurrently adopted. The community has been informally known as "The Mint City" due to I.P. Callison's mint plant and as "The Friendly City", nomenclature born from social symbolism connected to roses.
History
Chehalis began as a settlement around a warehouse beside a railroad track in 1873, when the Northern Pacific Railroad built northward from Kalama to Tacoma. Northern Pacific's decision bypassed the town of Claquato, then the county seat. This allowed Chehalis, in 1874, to become the central location for Lewis County government. Chehalis was incorporated on November 23, 1883. In 1940, the chief local industries were dairying, poultry raising, fruit growing, milk condensing, fruit and vegetable packing, brick and tile manufacturing, coal mining, portable house manufacturing, and fern shipping.
During World War II, Chehalis was home to a Boeing manufacturing plant. The factory was responsible for producing wing parts for airplanes, particularly for B-17 and B-29 bombers. The plant, which received Boeing's excellence pennant, existed between 1943 and 1945 and was located in the Harry B. Quick building. Built in the mid-1920s, it has been owned by the Lewis County Public Utilities District since the early 1940s. A plaque, installed on the exterior of the building in 2005 on the 60th anniversary of the war's end, honors the workers of the Boeing manufactory, of which 70% were Rosie the Riveters.
The city, known for its flooding events, suffered damages and hardship during other natural disasters and severe weather events. A report in the aftermath of the 1949 Olympia earthquake listed that approximately 40% of local Chehalis businesses and homes were damaged, including a tally of over 1,300 chimneys. One Chehalis resident was reported as injured and the Green Hill School, which lost the use of four buildings, recorded $2 million in damages. The high school and the West Side School were destroyed; neither was rebuilt. Chehalis was also hit hard during the Hanukkah Eve windstorm of 2006, with the interstate closed south of the city due to fallen trees.
A vessel in the United States Navy, the gunboat USS Chehalis (PGM-94), was named in honor of the city.
Flooding
Due to Chehalis being located near several large rivers and resting in a valley, heavy rains and snowmelt has led the city to experience numerous historic flooding events, often recorded between November and February.
Historical accounts and spiritual lessons passed down in the history of Native American people living in and around the Chehalis River tell of major floods in the basin. The first record of a flood, when the community known as Saundersville was settled, was in 1865. with the Chehalis and Skookumchuck rivers setting flood stage records. A state of emergency was declared and I-5 was closed for four days.
The city in the 21st century has had several floods of various levels including a record flood that closed the interstate in the town in December 2007 due to the Great Coastal Gale of 2007. Another major flood materialized over a year later in January 2009, immersing several regions within Chehalis, and I-5 and railroads were shut down once again. Less severe floods transpired during record daily rainfalls in 2010, 2012, and 2015. A stretch of I-5 between Chehalis and Centralia was closed for several hours after a major flood in January 2022.
Hate crimes and supremacy
Chehalis has not been immune to a history of hate crimes, racism, and white supremacy groups. An article written in the Chehalis Bee-Nugget newspaper from 1909 details a letter from a Black man who considered Chehalis a "white man's city" and would not move to the town. While the piece mentions that the people of Chehalis have not exhibited hostilities towards non-White people, the editorial does report that a Black family has never resided in the city while also acknowledging a lack of representation for citizens of Asian heritage. At the beginning of the 1910 Chehalis Gophers baseball season, the club and its ballplayers participated in a minstrel show, receiving positive reviews in a local paper. An "anti-Greek and Italian" movement existed in Chehalis around 1911 that demanded to abolish the employment of foreigners within the town.
In 1924, a rally for the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) was held at the Southwest Washington Fairgrounds and the estimated attendance was recorded between 20,000 and 30,000 members from around Washington. During the Great Depression, Chehalis and the surrounding cities and counties saw a rise in the participation of "Silver Shirts", a group that followed similar aspects to the Nazi movement of the era. In a Life magazine article from March 1939, the publication reported regarding hate groups and said Chehalis had a hate group leader in it, purportedly a local insurance man. A trio of female high school students wrote to the magazine, believing that the feature "did not accurately depict the feelings of local citizens" just the insurance man and his followers, and a follow-up photo article from Life in May showcased the city's actual more varied and "American ideals" atmosphere which tended to more highlight inclusion, tolerance and diversity. It was noted that the leader of that fascist group had left town after the original story had published.
After World War II, the emergence of the John Birch Society (JBS), which opposed the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, began to circulate in and around the community, though much of the group's noted activity occurred outside Chehalis with the group opening a bookstore in Centralia. Active and open participation from county residents in either the KKK or the JBS began to wane in the 1970s and 1980s, and the last activity of either group was recorded as taking place at the end of the century.
Residents in the city in more recent years have protested in favor of the Black Lives Matter movement, holding two demonstrations in 2020 at the Lewis County Courthouse after the murder of George Floyd. The second event was attended by approximately 300 people who knelt for 8 minutes 46 seconds in protest against police brutality. Notwithstanding a brief interruption, the assembly remained peaceful.
A rise in hate crimes against LGBTQ people in the 21st century also affected Chehalis, usually perpetrated or led by non-Chehalis residents. In the 2020s, a billboard in Chehalis supporting LGBTQ and racial equality movements was vandalized. A drag show held in June 2023 at the Chehalis Theater was a site of controversy when a political fundraiser that referred to drag performers as "groomers" was hosted nearby without theater approval by the Lewis County GOP, headed by a non-Chehalis resident, and timed so as to coincide with the drag show in the Chehalis Theater and a similarly protested Pride event that had been held in Centralia earlier that day. The GOP's actions were condemned by local leaders shortly after. The Chehalis Friendship Fence was vandalized during the hate crime attack. The fence was repainted days later through a volunteer effort. The fence was targeted again in February 2024 after a group of three people, all with ties to a variety of hate groups, as well as previous hate crime acts, splashed the artwork with black paint. The perpetrators, who were not from Chehalis, were chased down by a local resident and caught; fellow neighbors were able to wipe the paint off before it dried but the damages were severe enough that parts of the local attraction needed to be repainted. The trio were found guilty of misdemeanor malicious mischief but were acquitted by jury on hate crime charges.
Claquato
As translated from the Chehalis Native American language, Claquato means "high prairie" or "high land". The town began as a settlement in 1853 by Lewis Hawkins Davis, who originally named the area Davis Prairie. The community grew quickly to include Claquato Church, a cemetery, hotels, and several stores and was, for a time, the largest populated town between the Columbia River and Olympia. Davis donated land for the construction of a courthouse and by 1862 the town became the county seat for Lewis County until that designation was transferred to Chehalis in 1874. A blockhouse was built and used in the community during an 1855-1856 war between settlers and Native Americans, sheltering the founding family of Chehalis during the conflict.
Claquato is no longer a recognized town or municipality, While described as a ghost town as it was officially vacated in 1902, the area has been populated since its inception.
Geography
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the city has a total area of , of which, is land and is water.
The city rests in a valley bordered by foothills of the Cascade Range to the east and the Willapa Hills to the west. Chehalis straddles Interstate 5 at a point almost exactly halfway between Seattle, Washington and Portland, Oregon. The historic downtown and most of the city's amenities lie on the east side of the freeway, nestled at the base of a small range of forested hills. On the west side of the freeway are parks, farms, a few subdivisions developed in the hills to the west, and a centralized shopping district, the Twin City Town Center. The Chehalis–Centralia Airport is located immediately west of the freeway towards the northern end of the city. From numerous vantage points in the city and the Willapa Hills, there are views of Boistfort Peak and the three major volcanic mountains of the Cascades, Mount Rainier, Mount Adams, and Mount St. Helens, depending on weather conditions.
The Chehalis River winds its way through the valley in which the city resides, and is joined by a tributary, the Newaukum River. This confluence of waters, along with the intersections of tributaries and railroads within Chehalis, helped the city become known as "The Maple Leaf City". Both the Chehalis and Newaukum rivers are prone to flooding during periods of abnormally heavy or persistent rain, and the lowlands from the freeway westward are particularly susceptible to inundation. Near the Port of Chehalis is Dillenbaugh Creek, a watershed encompassing over .
Climate
This region experiences warm and dry summers, with no average monthly temperatures above 71.6 °F (22.0 °C). According to the Köppen Climate Classification system, Chehalis has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate, abbreviated "Csb" on climate maps.
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Weather events and records
The city was hit with 100 mph winds gusts during the Columbus Day storm of 1962.
Demographics
thumb|[[Ghost sign in Chehalis.]]