Valsetz School

I have become a crazy man since I have figured out how to post pictures. You can only imagine what kind of crazy I was when I figured out how the boy/girl thing worked when I was in the fifth grade getting the snot beat out of me in the ceramic room on a regular basis. The ceramic room is the three windows above the main entrance in the middle of the building.

This is the grade school junior high high school rolled up in one that I attended when I was growing up in Valsetz. This building was built early in the 20th century and torn down in the early 1980s.

Valsetz originally began as a small logging camp in the Coast Range Mountains in Oregon approximately 50 miles west of the state Capital in Salem. The town grew from several logging camps in the immediate area of the Siletz River, which meets the Pacific in Lincoln City. Valsetz was always owned by one timber company or another throughout its existance. At its largest Valsetz was inhibited with a little under 1,000 residence. The normal population would have remained around 600.

Valsetz had a plywood mill and a studmill, a company store, medical clinic, dance hall, library, post office, two churches, a pool hall, a two lane bowling alley, a firehouse, a VFW hall and a school. No bars, the adults drank where ever they damn well pleased. The residence lived in several hundred row houses that were rough at best but homey to all of us that grew up in them.

Since the town was owned by Boise Cascade since 1960 and they considered the families there as chattel Boise Cascade one day made a business decision to kick the people to curb, take their profits and leave. In 1985 the town was closed and then burned to the grown and the residence were dispursed throughout on their own.