Archives West Finding Aid

Grays Harbor County is located on the southwestern coast of Washington State and was named after a large estuarine bay that is the confluence of several rivers including the Chehalis, Hoquiam, Wishkah, and Humptulips. The bay was named after Captain Robert Gray, a Boston fur trader, who entered it on May 7, 1792. Captain Gray named the area Bullfinch Harbor, however, later cartographers called it Chehalis Bay and then, finally, Grays Harbor. Grays Harbor is home to several towns featured in the Newsfilm of Grays Harbor County including Aberdeen, Hoquiam, Cosmopolis, and Elma.

Originally, the region was populated by a number of Salish-speaking native groups, primarily representatives of the Quinault and Chehalis tribes. These communities commonly lived in permanent villages along major waterways and the coast, where they subsisted on salmon, whales, seals, and available inland game. One of the first encounters with whites occurred in 1775 with the arrival of Spanish explorers and traders near Grenville Point. The fledgling United States of America first made contact in 1792, when Boston fur trader Robert Gray brought the ship Columbia into the bay. Like the Spaniards, Gray and other American travelers moved on after a time due to the apparent unsuitability of the harbor for trading ships, leaving the Aberdeen region largely unsettled by whites until the 1860s. Only at this time did pioneers arrive in greater numbers in order to log, fish, and farm around the harbor hinterlands.

By 1900, the towns of Aberdeen and Hoquiam were home to more than 80 percent of the county’s inhabitants. The wood products industry was the main economic driver in the region, spawning logging operations, lumber mills, and shipyards. The dock facilities and harbor were improved in order to facilitate the exporting of the output of its mills and factories. In 1911 a Port District of Grays Harbor was established. The onset of the First World War created a demand for ships as well as wood, spurring significant expansion of the region's shipyards. In October 1918, the Grays Harbor Motorship Yard set the record for fastest ship construction when they launched the 4,000-ton wooden ship Aberdeen in only 23 and one half days. Nevertheless, lumber remained the foundation of the local economy; in 1924, the one-billionth board foot of timber was shipped from Aberdeen with much fanfare, temporarily earning the town the title of “Lumber Capital of the World.”

Grays Harbor County was booming through the 1920s, but a number of factors contributed to the decline in the wood products industry, from which it never recovered. The end of WWI hobbled local shipbuilding, and the onset of the Great Depression in 1929 sparked a collapse in the domestic and international construction industry. Lumber exports also declined. By mid-century, logging companies began to adopt policies that lowered output of the log supply to the Aberdeen mills. The effect of this shrinking supply chain, along with increased competition from Japan, British Columbia, and the Southern U.S., ensured that Aberdeen would never regain the heights of the pre-1930 period.

The Newsfilm of Grays Harbor County, taken from 1925-1933, documents a time when the community was enjoying the benefits of a strong and healthy economy.

The original 53 small reels of film in this collection were spliced together onto seven larger reels. This was done at the Library of Congress Motion Picture Conservation Center, Motion Picture Preservation Laboratory, where it was sent for examination, before the individual reels could be arranged by date or according to content. In order to make viewing the collection easier, the transferred films were imported into a computer editing system where they were arranged first by content, then chronologically, and compiled onto a single DVD (VC178). This collection guide describes the arrangement according to the items on VC178. The inventory notes the original reel of 35mm nitrate and the duplicating master from which each item was taken. The original reels retain the numbers given by the Library of Congress (i.e. GHOR211568-1-2, GHOR211568-1-3, etc.)

The first part of the collection was preserved in 2006 with a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation and consisted of 35mm black and white negatives that appeared to be outtakes from longer pieces in the unpreserved portion of the collection. A second portion was preserved in 2010 with funding from a second NFPF grant. This segment consisted primarily of the collection’s remaining negative footage, along with approximately half of the positive materials. The third and final portion of the collection, consisting primarily of tinted footage, was preserved with funding from the Apex Foundation.