News Of the Week
Nisqually Valley News
January 7, 1943
On Tuesday 14 pupils were absent from the McKenna school due to illness, mostly due to mumps, with few cases of measles.

It Goes Henry Ford One Better Or So, Does McKenna
By Francis Stone Burns
Tacoma Daily Ledger November 17, 1918
McKenna, Nov. 16.–(Special)–the blue and white old mountain, seamed and scarred, majestic, her throat wrapped in a scarf of mist, turned her face through the late autumn sunshine yesterday to a half hundred towns in Western Washington.
Her serene [...]

Scenes At The Salsich Lumber Company’s New Town Of McKenna — Mammoth New Industry Tributary To Tacoma.
NEW PLANT OF THE SALSICH LUMBER COMPANY AT MCKENNA.
Tacoma Daily Ledger May 2, 1909 (p. 40)
The Ledger presents herewith the first published picture of the Salsich Lumber company’s big new plan at McKenna on the Tacoma Eastern Railroad, together [...]

Tract Owned by Salsich Lumber Company Will Have Good Railroad Facilities
Tacoma Daily Ledger March 3, 1907 (p. 5)
Eastern capitalists, associated with H. E. Salsich in the purchase of land and water rights on the Nisqually River in Pierce and Thurston Counties, plan the establishment of a new town to be located on both the Union [...]

The Big Lumbering Boom Ended, But Many Residents Decided it Still Was a Good Place to Live
 By Alice Staples
 When the 20th Century was in its teens, the booming little logging town of McKenna, nestled on the Nisqually River 25 miles southwest of Tacoma was a “jumping, jiving community where the lights never went out,” old-timers [...]

About Fifty Houses Already Erected at McKenna
Lumber is Being Cut for 200 More-Town Laid Out With Broad Streets and Buildings Are Being Erected With View of Architectural Neatness
Tacoma Daily Ledger June 7, 1908 (p. 11)
(Special Dispatch to the Ledger)
Olympia, June 6 – – A model town in the making is in the way Fred Carlyon [...]

GOOD OUTLOOK FOR BUILDING IN 1907
ONLY ONE CLOUD EXISTS ON LOCAL HORIZON
Tacoma Daily Ledger December 23, 1906 (p. 20)
H. E. Salsich, the Eastern investor, who recently purchased 1,300 acres along the Nisqually and near Yelm, from F. W. Carylon, is arranging for the erection of a big sawmill upon the banks of the Nisqually, and [...]

REAL ESTATE MARKET BRISK
PRICES ON PACIFIC AVENUE AND C STREET LOTS GOING UP.
ACREAGE IS IN DEMAND
Tacoma Daily Ledger December 9, 1906
Some Important Transactions
The two big transactions of the week were the purchase of the Savoy Theater property by A. Bugge, of Bellingham, for $120,000 and the sale of 1,300 acres near Yelm, lying in Pierce [...]

LUMBER COMPANY IS RUSHING BIG PLANT
Tacoma Daily Ledger August 11, 1907 (p. 16)
Salsich Project at Nisqually to Be in Operation by Next April.
Construction work upon the big sawmill and townsite on the Nisqually, the projects of the Salsich Lumber company, is progressing rapidly. Members of the company that the big mill will probably be in [...]

Introduction: The following are excerpts from letters written by Arthur Sheckler while he worked at the McKenna Mill during the 1920s.

Will send cards and books of Yellowstone soon by parcel post. Must draw some money first.

McKenna Wash
Sept 3.23

 
Dear Mother:
Well I am sleeping on a bed again after 20 days on the hard ground altho I [...]