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City Of Longview history
City Of Longview company history timeline
In 1849, pioneers led by Harry and Rebecca Jane Huntington began to arrive in this area to settle along the Cowlitz River and file homestead papers.
Robert Alexander Long, one of nine children, was born on December 17, 1850, in Shelbyville, Kentucky.
In 1852, people from all over what was to become Washington state gathered in Monticello to draft a memorial to Congress.
The Southern Pacific bought a 100-acre tract in April 1870 from farmer 0.
In May 1871, the one-square-mile town of Longview was incorporated.
27, 1871, with O.H. Pegues, Jr. appointed first postmaster.
Panels 3: Longview Becomes the Hub for Railroad Expansion: 1872By 1872, Longview received nationwide attention by serving as temporary head of the nation’s Southern rail line.
Panel 4: A New County is Born: 1873In January 1873, Upshur County Representative B.W. Brown (a Methodist lay preacher) introduced a bill in the Texas Legislature to make Longview the seat of a new county to be composed of portions of existing Upshur, Rusk, and Harrison counties.
In April 1874, an additional 141 square miles south of the Sabine River was taken from Rusk County and given to Gregg.
Panel 6: Rails, Timber, and Cotton Bring Growth: 1877What eventually became the Santa Fe line running southeast from Longview Junction was begun in 1877 by the locally capitalized Longview and Sabine Valley Railroad Company.
By 1877, Barner Brothers mill at the Junction had about 50 employees and a capacity of 20,000 board feet of lumber per day.
The Kelly plant, supposedly the first chartered industry in Texas, had relocated to Longview from Marion County in 1882.
After a brief, unsuccessful venture running a butcher shop, he went to Columbus, Kansas, where he, along with his cousins, Victor Bell and Robert White, started a lumberyard, which eventually became the hugely successful Long-Bell Lumber Company, incorporated in 1884.
Panel 9: Longview Charters First Industry in Texas:As of 1890, the Kelly Plow Works reportedly was the only non-sawmill industry in the county other than an ice factory.
In 1891, Long moved Long-Bell’s general headquarters from Columbus to Kansas City.
In 1894, Bill Dalton and his outlaw gang robbed the First National Bank, located across Tyler Street from the fire station.
In 1897, a new courthouse was erected and the local Lacy Telephone Company began serving the community.
Panel 11: Transportation: Model T’s, Trains and TrolleysJ. Garland Pegues established the City Garage (later Pegues-Hurst Ford) in 1904.
The latter was housed in the Everett Building (built 1910), now home to the Gregg County Historical Museum.
Beginning in 1911, Longview’s rail center image was boosted with formation of a fourth line, the Port Bolivar & Iron Ore railroad.
By 1918 the southern timber holdings of Long-Bell lumber were nearly depleted.
In 1920, the Longview Rotary Club was organized as the city’s first service club.
By 1920-21, a 16-foot-wide strip of asphalt known as State Highway 15 (future United States 80) became the first paved road across Gregg County.
Panel 12: The End of the Beginning: 1920sBy 1920, Longview boasted 9 1/2 miles of paved streets, concrete sidewalks, electric streetlights, municipal garbage collection and a paid fire department with the state’s first two pumping trucks.
Long did not want a squalid mill town to spontaneously develop there, so he conceived of a beautiful new industrial city, which was planned and built in the 1920s.
In May, 1921, Wesley Vandercook, Long-Bell's Chief Engineer set up headquarters in Kelso, and with a hundred men began to survey the new purchase.
In August 1922, after the various sites had been platted, Long-Bell began the arduous process of grading and paving the streets, installing utilities, and building houses.
In 1922, Long hired Jesse C. Nichols, a successful real-estate developer, George B. Kessler, a renowned landscape architect, and Sidney Herbert Hare, a city planner from Kansas City, to offer advice and draft plans for the new community.
The name “Longview” in Cowlitz County became official in January 1923, with the establishment of a United States Post Office there.
Dedication ceremonies for the city of Longview were held at 10:00 a.m. on July 12, 1923, in front of the mostly completed Hotel Monticello.
The first formal census of Longview, to determine if the private city had enough residents to become a self-governing municipality, was taken in December 1923.
In 1923 Long-Bell asked to use the NP tracks, along with the Union Pacific and Great Northern Railways, but permission was denied because of the risk of accidents.
Commerce Avenue, Longview, January 1924
Jefferson Square, Broadway and main business district from roof of Hotel Monticello, Longview, January 1924
Long-Bell Lumber Mill, Longview, February 11, 1924
In February of 1924, it was incorporated and a municipal government was established.
In 1925, Long-Bell’s East Fir mill began operations producing “green wood” for the overseas market.
Built in 1925, Pacific Straw Board and Paper Company produced modest amounts of paper and cardboard.
Long-Bell’s financial troubles began in 1927 with a slump in the lumber market.
In January 1929, the Texas & Pacific moved its division offices and shops to Mineola taking away 700 families.
The Texas & Pacific belatedly donated an entire city block as the courthouse square, then platted a new town at Awalt, which remained undeveloped until it became Greggton in 1929.
Panel 13: First Discovery Wells & Then the Boom! 1930Black gold! Suddenly, the Great Depression was forgotten with late 1930 discovery of the East Texas Oil Field, biggest in the world.
The five-story Gregg Hotel, opened in 1930 and doubled in size by Conrad Hilton five years later, stood on the present site of Heritage Plaza.
By 1930, Longview's population had grown to approximately 10,700 residents, far short of the 30,000 people the Long-Bell Company expected and the 50,000 residents the community was planned for.
In 1932 Long-Bell, now in deep financial difficulties, sold their electrical power plant to Washington Gas and Electric Company for $3.2 million and the LP&N tracks between Longview and Vader to the NP for $4 million.
In December 1933, the Cowlitz River flooded, washing out sections of the LP&N tracks and railroad draw bridge.
In 1933, Weyerhaeuser developed Presto Logs to utilize wood waste and went into the production of pulp and paper.
In 1934, the Long-Bell Lumber Company owned 13 lumber mills, 110 retail lumber yards, a sash and door factory, and numerous warehouses.
The company filed for bankruptcy, then filed a reorganization plan in the Kansas City federal court in 1935.
In 1938, Longview’s citizens voted to rename Jefferson Park in Civic Center, R. A. Long Park.
Land was purchased with county funds from a 1940 bond issue.
Panel 16: A City That Grows: 1940’sLongview News-Journal Publisher Carl Estes successfully led a civic effort to bring R.G. LeTourneau’s excavator manufacturing company here.
In 1940, the advent of cheap, abundant hydroelectric power, generated by the Bonneville Dam and, in the future, the Grand Coulee Dam, brought Reynolds Metals Company to Longview, looking for a place to build a huge aluminum plant.
The smelter opened in September 1941, just in time to meet the aircraft industry’s increased need for aluminum.
The Gregg County Airport (now the East Texas Regional Airport) was opened in summer 1947.
Panel 17: Industry Accelerates Economic Growth: 1950’sThe area’s industrial development was greatly enhanced in 1950 when the Texas Eastman petrochemical plant located near Longview.
In 1956, International Paper Company (IP) purchased all remaining holdings of the Long-Bell Lumber Company and renamed it IP-Long-Bell.
Panel 19: Longview Expands Its Influence: 1960’sThe last decade of Longview’s first hundred years was a time of historic and fundamental change.
In 1960, Long-Bell’s old-growth fir and cedar had finally been depleted and the mills in Longview, antiquated and no longer profitable, were closed and dismantled.
In 1962, the “slant hole” scandal brought unfavorable national attention to the East Texas Oil Field.
In 1963, the city reached west of its own developed area and annexed the unincorporated community of Greggton, including much of the Pine Tree Independent School District.
In May 1970, Longview celebrated its centennial with a ten-day festival involving a large segment of the population.
The historic structure is the 195-foot-high Columbia River Longview Bridge, renamed the Lewis and Clark Bridge in 1980 (NR No.
When the sheds were torn down in 1996, the giant old-growth beams were salvaged and sold.
On May 3, 2000, Aluminum Company of American (Alcoa) engineered a $5.6 billion takeover of the Reynolds Metals Company to become the largest aluminum manufacturing company in the nation.
Longview Aluminum transferred ownership to Michigan Avenue Partners (MAP), an investment group, which closed the plant in March 2001, allegedly because electricity was now too expensive for the power-hungry smelter to be profitable.
MAP sold the smelter’s electricity contracts back to the Bonneville Power Administration for $225 million, then filed for bankruptcy protection in March 2003.
With the conclusion of the project in 2004, could enjoy a pleasing environment in downtown Longview with existing and new businesses there to welcome them.
According to the United States Census Bureau, in 2006 the city of Longview, the largest in Cowlitz County, had an estimated population of 35,710.
In February 2007, Longview Fibre was purchased by Brookfield Asset Management, a Canadian company, for $2.15 billion.
According to the states Office of Financial Management, in 2007 Longview was the 28th largest city in Washington, with an estimated population of 35,710.
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