Port Gamble

Port Gamble ran a sawmill for a hundred and forty-two years — the longest continuously operating mill in the United States when it finally closed in December 1995. Pope & Talbot built the town in 1853 as a deliberate piece of New England transplanted to the shore of Hood Canal: steepled church, gabled clapboard houses, maple-lined streets, a general store, a company payroll. The mill ships went out to San Francisco, Australia, Peru, England, Hawaii. The town stayed a company town the whole time — Pope & Talbot owned the houses, the store, the water, the whole arrangement — which is why it survived intact: nobody could build anything the company didn't want.

The mill whistle ran the town's clock, and the pigs ran the alley — the cookhouse scraps trained generations of loose hogs to charge down 'Pig Alley' at the whistle in droves dangerous enough that the route became hazardous at feeding time. The octagonal blockhouse from the settlement's nervous first years became a blacksmith shop. The Chinese cannery workers, the Irish, the Suquamish and S'Klallam whose land it all stood on — Port Gamble's company-town neatness sat on top of the usual frontier collisions.

The Walker-Ames House is the haunted one — built for the mill's master mechanic William Walker in the 1880s, later home to mill manager Edwin Ames. It's been empty since the mill closed, and it's the anchor of the town's ghost tours: children seen peering over an upstairs windowsill in a locked house, women's hair pulled in the basement, a stench that follows investigators out the door. The town that Pope & Talbot kept frozen in 1895 turned out to be the perfect vessel for the ones who never left.

The mill is gone — demolished after the shutdown, the site remediated — and the town is a National Historic Landmark that runs on tourism now. But Port Gamble is still what the company built: a New England village on a saltwater canal, keeping its dead in the houses where they lived.