LaCamas [was] not intended as a suburban town as [were] the villages around Portland … but rather as a manufacturing point. The Vancouver Independent, May 8, 1884
In 1883 a group of investors led by Henry Pittock, owner of The Oregonian, formed the LaCamas Colony Company and purchased 2600 acres for a paper mill to produce newsprint for The Oregonian. Caucasian and Chinese workers were brought to LaCamas to cut trees, burn stumps, dig ditches, and construct buildings. Pittock and his associates found that LaCamas was a natural site to build a mill because of abundant clean water and adequate wood supplies. Its location downstream from LaCamas Lake provided a natural power supply since water would flow by gravity toward the Columbia River and generate the necessary water power to supply the mill. The mill, updated and rebuilt after a 1886 fire, was the largest and most modern west of the Rocky Mountains, and produced more than three tons of newspaper a day. Workers used straw, local timber, and rags to make the paper.
The mill owners dammed the lower end of Round Lake, causing it to merge with LaCamas Lake. They hired more than thirty Chinese mine and railroad workers to build a tunnel and ditch from LaCamas Lake to the water storage basin just above the mill. By the end of the summer of 1884, the 100-plus Chinese laborers working in the LaCamas area established a small temporary village near the mill site, which included their own cooks and laundry men.
Newspaper articles: “A flourishing town”
Newspaper article: “Paper mill at LaCamas”
WSU Vancouver student paper about the early history of Camas
