Bart Ripps TNT story February 20th 2001
Feb. 20, 2001 The News Tribune"The shapes arise!Shapes of the using of
axes anyhow, and the users and all that neighbors
them."– Walt Whitman, "Song of the Broad-Axe," 1855.By Bart
RippThe News TribuneGLENOMA, Lewis County – Mists unveil Dog Mountain. The
mountain was home to camps where trains and trucks hauled logs cut by
men. Dog Mountain is gone to sports utility vehicles with manly names, and
hang gliders sailing down sunny days to the town that drowned.Kosmos lived and
died in Dog Mountain's shadow. The town lived maybe 70
years. In the early 1960s, Kosmos submitted to Tacoma Power's wish to build
a dam at Mossyrock and submerge the town in a manmade basin called Riffe
Lake. The $133 million Cowlitz River Project inundated Kosmos. Its lumber mill
closed, its logging town vanished in a payoff of $2.4 million. And yet, come
winter chill, Kosmos reappears.Like Alder, the Pierce County town that was
submerged when Tacoma Power
needed to build a reservoir, Kosmos resurfaces in muck, summoned by receding
water and visible with foundations of houses and places. These forms whisper
that something happened here.Unlike Alder, Kosmos was not moved up the hill. The
mill closed, people moved
away, Kosmos died. The last buildings were razed in 1965, the Cowlitz River
filled the manmade lake and Mossyrock Dam first generated power for Tacoma
in 1969."A lot of the older people, they died within a short period of time
after the
move," John Carnahan said. "They were uprooted from their homes. They
couldn't adjust."Carnahan is 91. He came to Kosmos in 1937, broke. He had
gone bust farming in
King Hill, Idaho. From 1945 to 1960, Carnahan owned the Kosmos
Korner(((CQ))) Store."We sold everything from .22 shells on up,"
Carnahan said. "Caulk shoes, work
boots, logging clothes, axes, White Owl cigars, plugs of chewing tobacco I
sliced with an old cutter. Big, 20-pound wheels of cheese I got from
Darigold and then aged and cut myself. I told folks I've got whatever they
want – if I can just find it."One sunny afternoon in about 1952, State
Police cars and motorcycles roared
up to Kosmos Korner Store. Troopers and men in suits came in for bottles of
pop. One man bought five cigars and handed John Carnahan a silver
dollar."That'll be 75 cents, including tax for the governor," Carnahan
said."That would be me," said Gov. Arthur B. Langlie, who had come
from dedicating
the new White Pass Highway up past Packwood.LIke the governor, everyone who came
to Kosmos asked about the name. There is
a Cosmopolis near Aberdeen in Grays Harbor County, and a Cosmos in
southwestern Minnesota, but Kosmos was a unique moniker.Kosmos was coined by a
Coiner. Ida Hare Coiner was Iowan by birth and
literary by nature. She came up with Kosmos – taken from the Greek word for
universe – when her husband Col. B.W. Coiner became one of the Cowlitz
Valley's first settlers.He was a real colonel. No hokey handles for Col. Beverly
Waugh Coiner. He was
from Mount Pleasant, Iowa, the son of a Methodist minister killed in the
Civil War. Col. Coiner taught English in Brazil, returned to his hometown of
Mount Pleasant to be the mayor at age 26, came west to Tacoma to practice
law in 1884, served as an Army officer in the Spanish-American War of 1898,
was Pierce County prosecuting attorney, United States attorney appointed by
President William H. Taft, and died in Tacoma in 1932, age 74.Coiner had a
95-acre farm on the Cowlitz between Kosmos and Nesika, also
named by his wife. Ida preferred the house they built at 717 N. I St. in
Tacoma."I know she hated living way out there. That's why they lived in
Tacoma,"
LaVonne M. Sparkman said. She is a Morton resident who has written four
books on East Lewis County history."Nobody knows where she got the
name," Sparkman said. Kosmos's corner of the world had 500 men working in
Kosmos Timber Company's
mill, a lumber camp recreation hall called The Blue Room, from 100 to 150
people living in town, the Kosmos Korner Store, a dance hall, a tavern named
the Circle H Tavern that became called Big Dick's after owner Dick Wierdt,
and a post office that doubled as home to the Palorose Cafe.Carnahan's sister
Elizabeth Barrett and husband Kenneth Barrett ran the
restaurant. Kenneth Barrett raised palomino horses. Elizabeth Barrett,
postmaster for 40 years, nurtured a garden with 350 rose bushes, some 35
varieties of rhododendrons, 2,500 gladiolus and more than 100 varieties of
dahlias. The name Palorose was a hybrid of palomino and rose."Her mother (Lissa
Barrett) had been a professional cook and she baked pies
for the Palorose," said Harold Cooper, 73, a former Lewis County
commissioner, and partners with brother George in the family logging
business."People came all the way from Chehalis for her blackberry
pies," Carnahan
said.In the dried mud bed that was Kosmos, red and green tiles survive on a
concrete foundation – relics of the Palorose floor. A few cement pads mark
where the Kosmos Korner Store stood. The foundations emerge in February, but
this is an exceptional winter. Riffe
Lake, 778 feet elevation when full, and normally 680 to 700 feet, has sunk
to a record low of 648 feet. Tacoma Power and the state Department of Fish
and Wildlife have placed additional signs and vehicle barriers on the lake
bed. Citations run $71 to $500."I was out here a couple of Sundays
back," Harold Cooper said, "and couldn't
find a place to park."Being a Kosmos native – a Kosmopolitan? – Cooper
knew the way to trails at
the base of Dog Mountain. The Cooper brothers know logging roads where they
can see foundations of the lumber mill, a sketchy outline of the town, and
an eddy in the Cowlitz where kids caught trout and steelhead salmon.
Everyone called it Kosmos Pool.A big puddle remains where the Kosmos Timber Co.
powder house left this world
one night in 1962 – a concussive harbinger of the town's demise. The powder
house exploded with a boom that uprooted alders, broke windows and lifted
houses from their foundations. Nobody was hurt beyond scratches from flying
glass. It was a kids' prank."Damn near took me out of bed," George
Cooper said. "If they hadn't taken two
tons of dynamite out of the powder house that very day, the whole town would
have blown."The explosion left a murky pool where the powder house sat.
Come February,
the powder house pool marks where the mill stood and Kosmos lived."You know
how the South treats a Yankee? That's how we feel about Tacoma,"
George Cooper said. "It's a hell of a feeling when somebody walks up to
your
door to buy you out and you know you have to sell."He received
$33,000 for 12 acres with 13 buildings, including his house.
Behind George Cooper's house in Glenoma, on a ridge above Riffe Lake, is a
tall shed full of tools and memories. It's the only building left from
Kosmos, salvaged by Cooper when he moved up the hill. On cold days when mists
swirl Dog Mountain's woods and Riffe Lake's waters
trickle to Mossyrock Dam, George Cooper goes out back to get a hammer or an
axe. Every time he walks in that hulk of a shed, he thinks of a place just
down the hill and never forgotten. Reach staff writer Bart Ripp at 253-597-8678
or bart.ripp@mail.tribnet.com
Article written by Bart Ripp
Reprinted with permission by:
Bart Ripp,
The News Tribune, Tacoma WA.
Thanks.