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From here http://www.kingcountyjournal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060625/NEWS/606250315


Railroad town died slowly and stubbornly, but left legacy behind
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Dallas Barnard
The Lester Depot, which was built in 1897, was the center of community life in the now-gone railroad town of Lester. It was eventually demolished.



By Mike Archbold
Journal Reporter


At the turn of the last century, the railroad town of Lester grew as fast as the railroads that opened the Puget Sound region to growth.

Lester, along the upper Green River, had a railroad depot, a roundhouse, businesses, a school, a church, a hotel, a railroad, a tavern and many homes. In the 1920s, the population of railroaders, along with a few loggers, and their families numbered more than 1,000.

Today, only a herd of elk roam the overgrown streets marked by a few rotting fence posts and the occasional iris among the tall grasses that speak of a domesticated past. The homes have been bulldozed, and most of the buildings are gone. Now part of the Tacoma City Water watershed, the small valley is closed to the public.

The mountain town located 14 miles west of Stampede Pass died slowly and stubbornly — like its last official resident, Gertrude Dowd Murphy, or Gert, as she was known to her many friends.

Gert was born in 1903. She came to Lester in 1927 to work as a teacher. It was a mere 12 years after the town was officially named after Lester Hansacker, the local Northern Pacific Railway telegraph operator..

Gert never really left. Three years ago, she died. She was 99, and the only person allowed to live out her life in Lester.

Missed but not forgotten

In her later years, the very independent-minded woman eschewed a nursing home. She summered in Lester with a relative and wintered in Kent with family.

She told interviewers she liked to walk the abandoned town, observing how the forested hillsides to the north and south were marching back together through Lester.

When the annual Lester reunion convenes next month at the Muckleshoot Casino in Auburn, Gert will be missed but in no way forgotten.

As she told a newspaper reporter in 1987 after the Lester school was closed: "I'm kind of independent, and I don't dwell on the sad things. It's bothersome that nobody lives here anymore. I do get blue, but things have to change and they do change. There is no sense being mad about it."

Growth and jobs, not change, were on the minds of those who came to Lester with the Northern Pacific. It was trains that made the sidings that then became depots and even communities. If the trains left, the towns died.

Abandoning Weston

Such was the case with Weston. The trains used to run through Weston, where the helper locomotives were staged to help freight trains cross the mountains. It also had a roundhouse and was considered a large community by rail town standards in the Cascades. When the railroad moved the roundhouse to Lester in 1914, Weston was abandoned.

Lester, which was originally called Deans, also served as a helper station to assist the freight trains across the mountains, according to Doris Jones, who lived in Lester in the 1950s and wrote a short history. When diesels replaced steam trains, fewer helpers and their crew were needed.

The fledgling depot was built in 1897 and expanded in 1906. The small station grew in importance with the completion in 1888 of the 9,850-foot-long Stampede tunnel. It replaced the eight miles of steep switchbacks that climbed the pass. When it opened, work on the first direct rail link between Lake Superior and Puget Sound was complete.

Advance in communication

The first telephone was installed in 1923. Lester and surrounding railroad towns even had their own telephone prefix. Electricity arrived in 1929. Maintenance crews were housed in the town up until the 1960s. Five major logging camps operated out of Lester; the last one pulled out in 1978. Homesteaders came to try their luck improving the land.

Ruth Trueblood Eckes of Auburn, who has written and published a series of books on Northern Pacific railroading people and their many stories, wrote of Madge Peterson Spear, who was born upstairs in the depot.

Spear recalled the lights of the semaphore flashing in the night just outside her bedroom window. She remembers watching the crews manually rotate the massive engines on the turntable at the roundhouse. She remembered rowdy bachelors shooting rounds into Saturday night skies.

Woman boss not welcome

Clayton McClean wrote the story, "Paradise Lester — 1930 to 1940." Eckes included McClean's memories in her "Rail Tales" book, "Down the Track." McClean recalled the Civilian Conservation Corps members who came to Lester and camped at nearby Friday Creek. They built fire roads through the forest to the outside world.

McClean remembered those years as merry ones, with baseball and basketball games and dances in the school gymnasium.

Eckes spent 1946 as the first woman agent at the Lester depot. Her welcome at the station wasn't pleasant. "Men didn't want women as bosses," she said. But she persevered and found friends among the loggers and railroaders and their families.

Winter weather was always a topic and a challenge. A 1963 newspaper story on Christmas that year said the temperature was 5 degrees above zero with light snow. The school pipes were frozen and the popular Christmas program at the school was called off. The Scott Paper Co. supplied gifts for the children. Gert helped distribute them.

Idyllic childhood

Dorothy Saunders Purser was 2 years old when she arrived in Lester with her parents, Herbert and Margaret Saunders, and her six siblings. Her father was an engineer and ran a 14-cow dairy. Now 86, she lives in Auburn like many of the former Lester residents.

She recalls an idyllic childhood where all the kids in town knew each other and played together.

Her family lived in the Morgan House, a summer home owned by the nearby mill owner from Tacoma. She said the two-story house was like the Neely Mansion in Auburn in size with rich furnishings. They had the only residential telephone for a number of years. And they had the only cement sidewalk where children would gather to skate.

Many bear encounters

Lester spawned many bear encounter stories. Purser said she can relate to the recent spate of bear sightings in suburban King County. She knew of no one killed by a bear in Lester but there were plenty of frightening encounters, including her own.

She remembers sitting on a log when a bear came crashing out of the woods and jumped over the log she was sitting at. "I could see the steam coming off its tongue and teeth," she said. And she ran. So did the bear. She lost a shoe but kept running, picking up briers and bruises on her feet.

Afterward, her father sent her back to find the shoe. "He couldn't afford new shoes," she said.

Purser left in 1951 but Lester never left her, she said. "Its amazing. Even today we are real close. I get telephone calls from them all the time."

Lester's time was growing short by the 1950s. It survived as a helper station until the diesel locomotives arrived in 1951. In 1958, the Northern Pacific closed the Lester Hotel as well as the roundhouse and boiler room. In 1967, Tacoma bought the rest of Lester for $37,000.

Wake held for town in 1985

In 1982-83 school year the number of students in the Lester school was down to 31. Trains came through Lester once or twice a week. By 1985 there were only eight students and the district was shut down.

A wake for Lester was held in 1985 and many of the old residents returned. They needed permission to get into the watershed and their old town. Gert's lifetime lease of a house in Lester gave her a lifetime pass.

The Stampede Pass line was closed in the mid-1980s but was rebuilt and reopened in December 1996. Today six freight trains a day roll through Lester. There is no one there to wave to the engineer, not even Gert.



Mike Archbold can be reached at [e-mail] or at 253-872-6647.



Lester Reunion

When: July 7, 10 a.m.

Where: Muckleshoot Casino in Auburn, Salmon Room

Sponsor: Northern Pacific Retirees Group of Auburn

What: Lunch, lecture and slide show on Lester, 1881-1985, by railroad historians Dave Sprau and Jim Frederickson; sale of new Lester scrapbook, a book of memories and photographs, compiled by Ruth Trueblood Eckes

Cost: $12

Information: 253-927-3910

Last modified: June 25. 2006 12:00AM