Hoquiam WA city hall (#1315)

Hoquiam City Hall, finished in 1929. Described as both Art Deco and "Starved Classicism"

I needed a place to stay between Astoria, OR and Olympic National Park and, looking at the map, I saw there was a surprisingly (for coastal Washington) densely populated area consisting of Hoquiam and Aberdeen, with good selection of motels. Since this was fairly populated area and a port town that I had never heard of, I figured it would be a good place to explore. I wasn’t disappointed.

“Hoquiam” comes from a Native American word that, per Wikipedia, means “hungry for wood”. When you go through the history of the area, that’s a very apt description since the town’s founding in the late 1800’s was due to the combination of logging and a port for shipping forest products. Per the HistoryLink article, the area went through all of the machinations associated with capital, labor, and commodity demand including rapid development, labor unrest and unionization, immigration opportunism by capital and consequent immigration hostility by labor, shifts from unionized labor to contract labor to reduce costs (and increase accidents), over-harvesting of wood to the point of stripping the land, and then eventually, federal protection to revive the land and thus decline in employment. A textbook case of capital/labor/commodity/demand relationships. If I’d known all of this while there, I would have planned on more time to explore its history.

One interesting, and probably predictable considering the labor strife, characteristic of the area is that the county (Grays Harbor) is (per Wikipedia county entry) one of the most consistently Democratic areas in the country having voted for a Republican president only once, and that was for Hoover in 1928.

Wikipedia Hoquiam: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoquiam,_Washington
Wikipedia Grays Harbor County: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grays_Harbor_County,_Washington
HistoryLink on Hoquiam: www.historylink.org/File/8652