- The blanket of old growth forest that covered the Willapa Hills surrounding Raymond, on the Willapa River in Pacific County, fueled the town’s growth from a handful of farms to a mill town bustling with trains filled with freshly cut logs, mills running 24 hours a day, and ships laden with lumber bound for the East Coast, South American, San Francisco, and Hawaii in less than a decade after its founding in 1903. When a combination of overharvesting, environmental laws, and changes in the global market severely reduced logging and milling in the 1980s and 1990s, Raymond residents looked to new, more sustainable ways to utilize the surrounding hills, rivers, and bay to create jobs and sustain their community.
- Mark Twain (Wikipedia)
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), best known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer. He was praised as the “greatest humorist the United States has produced”, and William Faulkner called him “the father of American literature”. His novels include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), the latter of which has often been called the “Great American Novel”. Twain also wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) and Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), and co-wrote The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873) with Charles Dudley Warner.