McCleary, Washington, glimpses with a cellphone: parking

Sunday, October 27, 2019

Weirdo-shaped parking strip

Oct. 26, 2019

What is with that weirdo-shaped parking strip between City Hall and the VFW Hall? As usual, there's a story there.

On the right hand of the photo is Beerbower Park. In the old days that chunk of land was Henry McCleary's original lumber mill, which was shut down in the 1930s.

On the left hand of the photo is the present Simpson door plant. In 1910 Henry McCleary bought the Chehalis Fir Door Company and moved the whole operation, including most of the workers to this camp. A giant clearing took place and a mountain of wood was burned to make space for his door plant. When it opened it was all electric and one of the largest and most modern door plants in the world. It also produced airplane and automobile parts when those industries used more wood in their product.

The two huge operations, sawmill and doorplant, were connected by a pedestrian skyway. Roughly about where the first tree in the line on the right sits there were two ugly buildings, big hulky two story cubes on either side of the road. A covered walkway on the second floor connected the twin structures.

For people arriving to town from the north, this gave the impression of entering through a Medieval gate during the feudal times, which in fact was not far off from reality This was Henry McCleary's Kingdom-- a one-man principality where you were paid in script, lived in company-owned homes, and God help you if you ever even entertained the very idea of forming a union.

This pedestrian skybridge did not exist for very long. The building on the west side where the door plant now resides was torn down first. The eastern building remained for some reason and just sat there like a wart. After Henry sold the entire town to Simpson on the last day of 1941 and the park was created by local people out of the ruins of the old mill, they had to work around that building and hence we have that elongated triangular parking strip.

When it was finally torn down maybe in the early 1950s a local newspaper commented that in the old days "they didn't build for pretty."