Alpine, WA
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Alpine, Washington is a former mill town that was abandoned in 1929. Author Mary Daheim revived the town in fiction in 1991, and others found the real site
11/11/2023
This is a test post of the Scenic depot of the Great Northern Railway. I don't have information to credit the source.
I have 2 pieces of bad news today. both happened yesterday. I can't think of any easy way to say this so I will just blurt it out. first, Mary Daheim died yesterday, so there will be no more Alpine stories from her wonderful imagination.
Second, Facebook has decided that the account that I used to set up this page is a "gray account" and intends to terminate it at the end of this month. I assume that means that everything here will disappear. I had decide yesterday to organize a group about Alpine, no name so far. But I need to ask that everyone who has seen a picture or message that they like needs to make a copy so that information isn't lost.
I think that is enough bad news for one day.
12/01/2021
Warner Blake is working on an article for historylink about Carl Clemans. Warner just sent me this illustration form the San Francisco Call, December 18, 1892. The illustration depicts the wedge formation used by football teams before it was outlawed. !892 was the year Stanford played Cal in the first "Big Game", the first inter-collegiate football game played on the West Coast. the teams in the illustration are likely Stanford and Cal. Carl Clemans was the star running back for Stanford at that time, 2 decades before he founded Alpine.
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Our Story
Alpne, Washington began as a depot location named Nippon on the Great Northern Railway in 1892. In 1910 a sawmill began to operate and the depot location became a town. The post office was named Alpine because the post office already had a Nippon post office in central Seattle. In 1914 the Great Northern Railway renamed the depot to Alpine to conform with the post office name. In 1920 the mill was renamed the Alpine Lumber Company. Thus the town is known to history as Alpine. The mill closed in 1929 and the town was abandoned. The family of Mary Daheim lived in Alpine. In 1991, just a year before the 100th anniversary of the first depot, Mary Daheim began to write a series of best-selling fictional mysteries that take place in an Alpine that continued to survive and grow after the mill closed. These books brought new attention to the town of Alpine 60 years after it was abandoned. Others, following the route of the Great Northern Railway, sought the location of the actual town and found it in 2008. Interest in Alpine continues to grow from these 2 different, but not mutually exclusive, points of view. This page includes old photos and new photos of Alpine, and recent photos of the revival that is going on in the town of Skykomish (6 miles from Alpine) and in the upper Skykomish River Valley.
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