reminds me that the meaning of the word Hoquiam is “ hungry
for wood.”
The growth and business of Cosmopolis and the two Aber- deens was incited by Hoquiam, which is the father of them all. The history of this section is interesting.
Gray’s Harbor extends inland fifteen miles, and has a width for half that distance of twelve miles, gradually narrowing towards the east until it forms a rather sharp point at the mouth of the Chehalis River. The tout ensemble is not very different from an arrow-head. The entrance is between two sand spits, Point Brown, on the north, and Point Hanson (Chehalis, or Petersen’s Point), on the south, and is a mile and a quarter wide, with a nearly straight channel a little north of east to the mouth of the river; the water in the channel being for the greater part of the distance twenty-two feet at mean low water, and thirty-one feet and upwards at mean high water. North Bay and South Bay are north and south of the entrance, and separated from the sea only by long and narrow necks of low land. Channels from the main one ramify into these bays, also one to the mouth of John’s River, which enters on the south side, another to Jones’s Point, a little further east, which continues on to the niouth of the Chehalis, and is known as the South Channel. There is also a channel running north from the main one to the mouth of the Humptulips River, an important stream, and to two other streams flowing into North Bay, besides some cross-channels; and there is an anchorage of fully six thousand acres in the harbor where twenty-five feet at low tide is to be found. Nothing has ever been done to improve Gray’s Harbor. Its commerce has been created by private enterprise alone; but there is a petition before Congress asking for surveys and improvements, and to have it made a port of entry. A very favorable feature of this harbor is the absence of the destructive teredo, so active in the waters of the Sound. So many fresh-water streams come into it that the teredo cannot live in it, and a ship’s bottom covered with barnacles is thoroughly cleaned in forty-eight hours.
Gray’s Harbor was discovered by the same doughty Captain Gray who discovered the Columbia, but he modestly named it Bulfmch Harbor, after one of the owners of his vessel. He
