Chehalis boasts a storied history dating back centuries. Originally inhabited by the Chehalis people, the area later became a hub for logging and timber industries in the late 19th century, driving its growth. The town was officially incorporated in 1883. Over the years, Chehalis has witnessed economic shifts, including the rise of agriculture and railroad transportation. It also faced challenges, such as floods that have periodically affected the community. Despite these obstacles, Chehalis persevered, evolving into a vibrant city known for its historic charm, cultural heritage, and scenic beauty, attracting visitors and residents alike to its welcoming streets.
Eliza Tynan Saunders Barrett (1824-1900) is somewhat unrecognized today for the pivotal role she played in shaping the urban form of modern Chehalis. The present site of Chehalis is largely located on land once owned by Eliza Barrett and her husband, Schuyler Saunders. Following her divorce from Saunders in 1859, Eliza controlled over three hundred acres of land in Chehalis, and for almost forty years, her decisions about land speculation and development guided urban growth.
Discover the charming town of Chehalis through Experience Chehalis’s Historic Walking Tour. Follow along on your mobile device. Choose to read along or utilize the narrated version. You can also pick up a copy of the printed guide at Book ‘N’ Brush, the Lewis County Historical Museum or Chehalis Timberland Library.
As participants embark on this experience through downtown Chehalis, they will follow a curated narrative that brings the community’s history to life. The walking tour guide expertly leads visitors by significant buildings and hidden gems, providing insightful commentary at every turn. Each stop on the tour reveals a different chapter of Chehalis’s evolution. Participants are transported back in time, witnessing the triumphs and tribulations that shaped Chehalis into what it is today. The guide paints a vivid picture of a colorful past, connecting visitors with Chehalis’s heritage. Whether a history enthusiast or a casual observer, the Chehalis Historic Walking Tour Guide promises an enriching experience that resonates long after the journey ends.
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Eliza Tynan Saunders Barrett (1824-1900) is unrecognized today for the pivotal role she played in shaping the urban form of modern Chehalis. The present site of Chehalis is largely located on land once owned by Eliza Barrett and her husband Schuyler Saunders. Following her divorce from Saunders in 1859, Eliza controlled over three hundred acres of land in Chehalis, and for almost forty years her decisions about land speculation and development guided urban growth.
Eliza Tynan was an Irish immigrant to the United States who was working as a waitress at Fort Vancouver when she met and married Schuyler Saunders in 1851. Shortly thereafter, the couple moved to the Chehalis Valley and filed a claim under the Donation Land Claim Act, an early version of the Homestead Act unique to the Pacific Northwest. After nine years of marriage, in which Schuyler and Eliza had five children, she married three more times. Her second husband, Mr. McGuire, deserted both her and their daughter; a third marriage in 1865 to H.F. Basye, produced two children and ended in divorce. A fourth marriage to John C. Barrett also ended in divorce when John attempted to have Eliza sign documents that she was unsure of. Eliza chose to keep this husband’s last name until she died in 1900.
Because of her considerable real estate holdings, a number of men, including several husbands, attempted to take advantage of her. It is said that she could neither read nor write, but she must have been a quick learner. Whether out of trepidation after being cheated once too often or out of well-placed shrewdness about the pattern of urban growth, Eliza Barrett chose to sell and develop her property cautiously. Chehalis promoter William West was one of her many critics. “The growth of Chehalis,” he asserted in his memoirs, “was greatly hindered by the reluctance of the owner of the land to lay off a townsite, or to sell any land to anyone else that would do so, only a few blocks being laid off at any one time, so that the population increased very slowly.”
Eliza Barrett was in no rush to join the men anxious to make a fast buck in real estate promotion, even as the village evolved around her. She subdivided (or platted) a small parcel in 1875 and five more between 1881 and 1883 — actions that failed to satisfy local boosters — but Barrett held her ground. Eventually, between 1888 and 1893, Eliza Barrett sold or platted a total of ten sizable parcels and even decided to develop a couple of lots herself. Significantly, her decisions about land use and civic progress emphasized priorities rather different from the materialistic calculations of city fathers. She chose to construct the first music hall in Chehalis, the Tynan Opera House (1889). She is also credited with building the first Catholic church (1889) and a Catholic boarding school for girls (1895), municipal contributions that reflected her cultural roots as an Irish-American living in a predominantly Protestant community. Her one purely commercial venture was the construction of the Barrett Block (1891), across Chehalis Avenue from the present county courthouse.
None of these structures survives today. Their absence is mute testimony to how Eliza Barrett’s contribution to urban growth has faded from public memory. While streets in the Alfred Street Addition (1890) carried the first names of Eliza’s children, including her four sons by Schuyler Saunders (James, Alfred, William, and Joseph), the only architectural monument to Eliza Barrett’s life is her gravestone in Fern Hill Cemetery. In a final indignity, the marker misspells her last name.
Chehalis’s first commercial district and civic center was located along Main Street, west of the tracks of the Northern Pacific Railroad. There were two reasons for the early concentration of activity in this area. First was its proximity to the railroad, the transportation and communication link with distant markets and political capitals. Second was the availability of real estate. As early as 1875, Eliza Barrett platted three blocks of MaiStreet, west of the railroad tracks, and here the town began to grow.
The first glimmering of an urban core was the collection of buildings and businesses that sprang up in the 1870s near the warehouse erected as the settlement’s first railroad station. The small warehouse was followed by a general store established by a merchant from neighboring community, and by the end of the decade the warehouse itself had been enlarged into a full-scale meat packing plant. Construction of two civic building ins the mid-1870s confirmed the municipal significance of western Main Street. When Chehalis was designated the county seat, the courthouse was erected on an acre west of the tracks and a block north of Main StreetTwo years later, in 1876, the first schoolhouse was built near the courthouse at State and Center streets.
As the town developed, commercial activity spread east along Main Street toward its intersection with Chehalis Avenue. This area became the second city center in the 1880s. Eliza Barrett played a crucial role as an urban planner by releasing five parcels for development between 1881 and 1883. One of her many critics, who believed she had not been sufficiently interested in schemes to develop her land, was pleased with the platting. “Parties holding property in the past with a death grip have been gradually letting go,” he informed the readers of the Lewis County Bee in 1884.
Toward the end of the decade, Eliza Barrett moved to solidify the increasing importance of the intersection of Main and Chehalis as the new city center. Her construction of two significant structures on diagonal corners — the Tynan Opera House and the Barrett Block, a large brick building that came to house a bank and theBarrett Hotel — seemed to confirm that Chehalis andMain would be the cultural and commercial heart of the growing city.
But two fires in 1892 destroyed most of the wooden buildings in this part of town, as well as its prospects as the city center. The first fire in March consumed a block of business buildings. A second fire on May 22 less than two months later, was even more devastating, leveling about thirty buildings in four blocks. The blaze spread so rapidly that “little was saved by the residents and businessmen in the entire district,” according to The Chehalis Nugget, reporting on the day of the inferno. In the newspaper’s opinion, both fires were set deliberately.
After the March fire a number of citizens in the burned out district apparently suspected arson, but the second fire, The Nugget stated flatly, “was beyond doubt started by an incendiary.”
Although redevelopment was considered for MainStreet, the post-fire building boom occurred six blocks to the north on Market Boulevard, much resented by the merchants and residents of the former downtown. The two suspicious fires encouraged the development of a third city center and caused the value of Eliza Barrett’s real estate to decrease greatly in value.
The dramatic shift of the central business district fromMain Street to Market Boulevard in the 1890s is often attributed to the two great fires of 1892. Actually, the fires did not inaugurate the migration of the city center so much as they coincided with it. Even before the fires, some of the city’s leading citizens were backing a competing business district centered at the intersection of Market and Boistfort Street. The First National Bank building, erected in 1889, was the first important commercial structure at the location, and other buildings quickly followed the example of the community’s leading bank.
The Chehalis Improvement Company constructed two other buildings, the Improvement Block (1891) and the Columbus Block (1892), on opposite corners at Market and Boistfort. A first-class hotel went up next.
Between 1890 and 1894, the Chehalis Land & TimberCompany, with financing from the First National Bank, constructed the St. Helens Hotel a block away from the newly pivotal intersection. In short, three years before the calamitous fires, banking and real estate interests were already embarked on a major development project outside the traditional business corridor of Main Street.
The motives behind this effort to reshape the commercial geography of Chehalis seemed clear to the local journalist who characterized the activities of the Chehalis Improvement Company as an attempt by prominent citizens to insure “a solid appearance for the town as well as a profitable investment for themselves.” But the undertaking may have also represented an attempt by civic boosters to reduce Eliza Barrett’s future role in urban growth by establishing a downtown outside her control. New commercial buildings continued to be erected on both Chehalis Avenue and Main Street, but the civic prominence of Market Boulevard was unchallenged for sixty years after the 1890s. Not until the 1950s did the business district begin to shift another time, to the shopping mall complex (now SunbirdShopping Center) on National Avenue.
The 19th-century struggle over the location of the city center pitted the ambitious and self interested calculations of some of the community’s most prominent citizens against the somewhat less materialistic concerns of an early, and largely forgotten, female town planner. More generally, the evolution of the downtown district illustrated how the process of community development was shaped by competing private visions of its urban future.
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