34 • Saturday, July 11, 2015 • Journey on the Cowlitz • The Chronicle
Underwater Towns of the Cowlitz River BENEATH RIFFE LAKE: Several Formerly Thriving Communities Are Now Submerged Memories
brief time it even had a pirate radio station that played popular songs, taking requests and dedications. By 1955, when Tacoma had permission to build the Mayfield and Mossyrock dams, the people of Riffe knew their town’s days were numbered. Rose and othBy Brian Mittge er baby boomer children grew up with the For The Chronicle unsettling feeling of knowing their homenderneath the waters of Lewis town was doomed. The Riffe post office County’s largest lake lie the closed on May 31, 1966. By the spring of former townsites of Kosmos, 1968, the town was under several hundred Nesika and Riffe, the town that gave the feet of water from the rising lake. lake its name (although it took a few years. More on that later). Early Days For the better part of the 20th century, Rose’s book recounts stories back to until construction of the new direct highway between Mossyrock and Randle in the earliest settlements of Riffe. One parthe 1960s, the town of Riffe was the cross- ticularly tragic event took place exactly road between Mossyrock, Morton and the 100 years ago. It shows the sometimes harBig Bottom country of the upper Cowlitz. rowing early days of the Cowlitz, where The long-gone community of Riffe the untamed river gave life to the area but — and, in a roundabout way, today’s lake sometimes also brought death. In May 1915, five residents of Morton — take their shared name from a pioneer named Floyd Riffe. He arrived in the area drowned at Riffe while trying to cross the in 1893 from West Virginia and estab- Cowlitz on a ferry as they headed to Mass at the Catholic church in the community of lished the post office in Riffe in 1898. Buddy Rose, who lived in Riffe from Harmony. The wagon’s front wheels had his birth in 1948 until Tacoma City Light made it onto the ferry when the two-horse took possession of the area in 1963 under team suddenly panicked and tried to back eminent domain laws, published a book of up off the boat. Instead, the horses ended up stories about his hometown in 2013. pushing the ferry away from the dock. His family owned nine houses and a The wagon and its passengers fell into service station in the middle of town, fed the river. Two women and three small via an elaborate system of underground children drowned. pipes from a hillside spring. Rose’s aunt, Thelma Hancock, was In 1960 or so, when Rose was about 12, a young girl who witnessed the accident. Tacoma City Light surveyed the area that She told him that the screams of the vicwould become the high water mark of the tims as they were swept downstream future reservoir. Rose and a group of his haunted her for years. friends climbed the hills south of town up That tragedy led to construction of a 170to the survey line. foot bridge across the Cowlitz. It was pur“We could go up and see where the lake chased in Oregon for $25,000, disassembled was going to be. It was kind of amazing, and hauled to Riffe by rail, and rebuilt on the really. We’d stand there and look across road running north toward Morton. Dedicathe valley. It seemed impossible — how tion of the Riffe bridge in 1919 was a lavish could they possibly fill this valley with affair, with attendees dressed in their Sunwater? It would take a hundred years.” day best and a musical performance by the He paused and laughed as he told the Centralia Concert Band. story. “It took eight months.” Nesika Rose estimates that about 1,500 peoUpstream from Riffe was the comple were displaced by the lake. About 350 of those people were in or near Riffe. The munity of Nesika, where the 1914 deditown resembled a more compact version cation of a bridge over the Cowlitz was of today’s community of Glenoma. It was greeted with equal fanfare. Just four years a crossroads about 7 miles east of Moss- later, floods changed the course of the rivyrock with stores and gas stations. For a er and damaged the bridge approach. Over
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the years two more spans were added to accommodate the meandering Cowlitz. The 848-foot bridge lasted until November 1967. It was set to remain open for a few more months as the valley neared inundation, but repair workers using cutting torches accidentally set fire to its creosote planking. The blaze destroyed 200 feet of the bridge and it was shut down for good. The steel bridge was sold to a Tacoma salvage company, which blasted it from its concrete footings during disassembly and managed to lose the third span — it was swept away in the river channel. The elevation of the old Nesika bridge deck was 595 feet above sea level. Riffe Lake, at full elevation, is 778 feet — almost 200 feet above the old bridge and the small neighboring community. Nesika was marked by a famous landmark near the east end of the bridge — an enormous “balanced rock” perched alongside what was known then as Highway 5. The area was also home to a longtime community of Cowlitz Indians, including property owned by famed Cowlitz elder Mary Kiona, and their cemetery along a waterway known as Indian Creek.
Kosmos
The Chronicle / File Photo
the bridge to see how much damage was done by different amounts of explosives. “Finally, they just loaded it up and blew the whole thing apart,” George Cooper, of Glenoma, told The Chronicle in 2002. The most prominent feature of Komsos before inundation was the Kosmos Timber Co. mill. It was moved toward Morton and became U.S. Plywood, eventually merging with Champion Papers.
What’s in a Name? The 23-mile long lake formed in 1968 by the Mossyrock Dam was originally named after Ira S. Davisson, a mustachioed former Tacoma utilities commissioner. Davisson, who had died at age 91 in 1951, was unknown in Lewis County and the name Davisson Lake was never popular here. In advance of the 1976 national bicentennial, dozens of local groups, from the countywide Pomona Grange to the Lewis County Historical Society, successfully pushed for a name change to recognize the history of the submerged Cowlitz valley, rather than a Tacoma bureaucrat. Davisson was not the only unusual name suggested for Tacoma’s projects on the Cowlitz. Tacoma City Light had originally proposed naming the dam at Mossyrock after a onetime socialist turned Democratic U.S. senator with a passion for publicly owned hydroelectric facilities. If approved, the tallest dam in Washington would have been known as the Homer T. Bone Dam. •••
The town farthest upstream under today’s Riffe Lake was Kosmos (pronounced CAUSE-muss), whose residents originally thought the new hydroelectric impound would give them lakeside property. As Tacoma’s plans developed, however, the dam proposal increased in height — and so the newly created lake became bigger, too. “Those people of Kosmos didn’t anticipate having to leave,” Rose said. When the water level is very low in Riffe Lake, the old Kosmos townsite emerges, ghostly and skeletal, from the water. The buildings are all demolished and gone, but the concrete below them is still there. So, too, are remnants of the bridges that once crossed the three creeks that met up with the Cowlitz River near Kosmos. Most prominent is the concrete and rebar jumble of the Steffen Creek Bridge. With the town dismantled and water creeping up the valley, the Army Corps of Engineers blew up the bridge as a training Brian Mittge is a community columnist exercise in 1968. The Corps spent a week for The Chronicle. Reach him at briansetting off small charges on and around mittge@hotmail.com or twitter.com/bmittge.