Bordeaux, Washington: The French-Canadian Lumber Town That Ran Out of Trees

Then they ran out of trees.

Bordeaux, Washington is a ghost town in Thurston County, near Mima Mounds along Mima Creek. It was founded around 1899 by the Bordeaux brothers and died in 1941 when the standing forests that fueled the mills were exhausted. The post office closed in 1942. Today, crumbling brick walls, an old basement, bridge footings, and a single house are all that remain.

01Why Was Bordeaux Founded?

The Bordeaux brothers started with the Mason County Logging Company before establishing their own operations in the Black Hills of southern Thurston County. The dense Douglas fir and cedar forests of western Washington were being systematically logged in the late nineteenth century, and the Bordeaux family saw opportunity in the timber south of Olympia.

What began as a logging camp in the 1890s grew as the Mumby Lumber & Shingle Company expanded operations. By 1903, the settlement had enough population to justify a post office — the federal government's way of recognizing a community's existence.

02The Company Town

Bordeaux was a classic Pacific Northwest company town: built by the lumber company, populated by its workers, sustained entirely by the mill's operations. The town had a school for workers' children, a hotel for visitors and transient laborers, stores for supplies, and residential neighborhoods laid out in the clearings between the stumps.

The 90-mile railroad was the lifeline. Shingles and dimensional lumber — 2x4s and the building materials that constructed early twentieth-century Washington — traveled out. Supplies and new workers traveled in. At peak production in the mid-1920s, 600,000 board feet moved down the line.

03What Happened to Bordeaux?

The forests ran out. Pacific Northwest logging in the early twentieth century was extractive, not sustainable — you cut everything, loaded it on the train, and moved on. By 1941, the standing timber within economic reach of Bordeaux's mills was gone. The mills shut down. Hundreds of jobs disappeared. Workers and their families left within months.

The post office closed in 1942, one year after the mills. Bordeaux joined the long list of western Washington timber towns that logged themselves out of existence.

04What Remains of Bordeaux Today

Crumbling brick walls, an old basement foundation, bridge footings from the railroad, and a single surviving house. The site is about a mile west of the Mima Mounds Natural Area Preserve along the banks of Mima Creek.

James S. Hannum published a book-length history of the town, available on the Internet Archive: "Bordeaux, Washington, A Historic Thurston County Ghost Town."