The town’s publicly declared purpose was to make it a “stable” and “comfortable” base for millhands and itinerant and “wild” loggers (commonly referred to as timber beasts). The company didn’t happily enter into the construction of an entire town, but did so at a time when the Wobblies were making enormous inroads in the lumber camps. As WWI was heating up, it became clear to Weyerhaeuser and to the federal government that there could be a critical shortage of Sitka spruce, crucial for constructing warplanes, if the anarchists paralyzed the industry.

Lumber camps were horrible places to live—damp, overcrowded, vermin—and testosterone-ridden. In order to defeat the Wobblies, the company was forced to dramatically better the living situation of its isolated employees. If the beasts were to be tamed, a host of resident man-tamers was needed. Accordingly, the success of the initiative was entirely dependent on attracting females to the “settlement.” A man employed by the Snoqualmie Falls Lumber Company was entitled to a company house at a nominal rent, but only if he had a wife with whom to occupy it. The commercial and industrial heart of the town was of course the lumber mill, but its nerve center was the community hall. For decades, the company organized all manner of family- and women-centered events and programs there. Dances, contests stream of babies was born in the town hospital, (the same facility that treated the loggers working in the world’s most dangerous occupation).

The outbreak of WWI brought a huge manpower shortage; large numbers of ablebodied American men were either being conscripted or volunteering for the armed forces. In order to open the mill in 1917, the company arranged with a Japanese contractor, who supplied a contingent of Japanese-born workers. With this core group, some ex-timber beasts and a few women workers, the mill opened on schedule.

According to company records, until 1942, when the men were sent to Idaho for internment, the Japanese never represented less than half the workers employed at any time. Yet photographs very rarely showed them. Common perception is that the workers were burly, blond Scandinavians, though to the company, the Japanese were known as “well-behaved” and “hard workers” who never caused labor troubles, the very qualities that Weyerhaeuser was trying to inculcate in its workforce by building and maintaining the town. The Japanese bunkhouse was far removed from the housing offered to the Caucasian workers and was torn down the day after the men were sent to internment.

In its literature about the town, Weyerhaeuser wrote that families “enjoyed all the comforts of the city home with the additional advantages of fresh air and plenty of room.” The “tree-growing company” effectively became the family-growing company, creating city life in the forest. By 1958, the forest itself had also been tamed, no longer offering close-in harvest, and the town was abandoned. Snoqualmie Ridge, another Weyerhaeuser planned community, has since sprouted nearby, and Weyerhaeuser has made known its desire to officially become a real estate investment trust (REIT). The social experiment that produced the town of Snoqualmie Falls would seem to have been much more central to the core Weyerhaeuser business than it might have appeared at the time.