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Everett Herald, Monday, January 3, 1994 

Fire kills tiny town of Lester 

Last resident laments loss 
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LESTER ---- The town of Lester was 102 when it died, only a dozen years older than its last resident, Gertrude Murphy.

On Thursday, Murphy stood silently in the cold to watch smoke rise from the charred rubble of her home. The fire was the final blow to this historic logging town, nestled amid mountain peaks at the scenic headwaters of the Green River just below Stampede Pass.

"I fought to save this town, to keep it going, but they killed it, and now it's gone," Murphy said. "There's nothing here anymore."

The white clapboard house she shared with her niece, Mary Aucort, burned to the ground the day after Christmas. The fire has been blamed on decrepit chimney.

Murphy says this rough-hewn hamlet's spell over her began when she arrived in 1932 to take a job as schoolteacher.

"It's hard to believe there ever was a town here," she said as she pulled a blackened cooking pot from the debris.

"It's like visiting ghosts now. This was my home. It was so lovely here, so quiet and remote. So wonderful and pretty. You should have seen it back then."

Until two years ago, Murphy was rising at 4 a.m. to cook breakfast for her hunting nephews. A few years ago before that, she herself hunted deer.

Last year she broke both hips and recovered.

Her house is gone, but Murphy she still plans to drive the bumpy 26 miles in her four-wheel drive vehicle to visit the town.

She remembers Saturday night dances at the school, Greeting the 4:20 p.m. Northern Pacific train "just to see the passengers," picking raspberries and wild mushrooms. She also remembers the bootlegging loggers who'd dump their booze in the woods when warned of a raid.

Now, there are gnarled hunks of concrete where houses used to be.

Lester was once the largest original settlement on the upper Green River, developed and founded Northern Pacific Railroad in 1891 as a "helper station" for trains coming up the steep grade to the pass and Stampede Tunnel.

Logging operations followed as Lester reached it's peak population of 300 in 1927. There was a general store with a small hotel above it, a busy train depot, a tavern and a post office.

The first blow to the town came in 1978, when the Scott Paper Co. logging camp just outside of town closed.

And Tacoma Public Utilities slowly began buying up leases the railroad had given the townsfolk to build their homes. Tacoma, which had used the upper Green River as city watershed since 1913, wanted Lester dismantled to protect the city's unfiltered water supply.

Those holding leases here were allowed to stay until they abandoned their homes or died. But leases could not be transferred or sold, even to descendants. As residents died or moved away their homes were torn down.

Murphy and Aucort, who sent Christmas with friends in Kent, had planned to return home Saturday. Another niece, Madonna Rabellos, was at the house and started a fire in the fireplace.

Within minutes, the attic was on fire. Rabellos called 911 instructed her 14-year-old son and a friend of his to gather up as many of Murphy's belongings as possible and get them out of the house.

It took firefighters about an hour to reach the house. By the time they arrived it was gone.

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