CONCRETE — Driving east on Highway 20 into the Cascade foothills, the large, gray silos tower above the highway, a tribute to Concrete’s industrial history and its 15 minutes of fame as the backdrop to the 1993 movie “This Boy’s Life.”

It’s been about 42 years since Lone Star Northwest’s cement plant closed down in Concrete, leaving only the silos, a cement company administration building and statue boasting its impressive safety record, some old concrete buildings downtown and memories.

With the death of the cement plant, the survival of the blue-collar town seemed to hinge on the booming timber industry, and the 20 or so shake, shingle and lumber mills that dotted the area.

Then came strict new logging regulations, the spotted owl controversy and competition from Canadian timber companies. The state’s logging industry choked under it all, and Concrete lost its second big industry and — for all practical purposes — the economic engine that kept it afloat.

Through the years, the once-bustling industrial town has struggled under the weight of change, thrashing to define itself again.

Now on the eve of the town’s centennial celebration, scheduled for Saturday, May 9, the people of Concrete have come together to decide what the next 100 years will hold for their town.

Will it turn into a tourist attraction like Leavenworth, with thriving retail stores, restaurants and motels? Or will it continue to exist as a bedroom community?

Small-town life a draw

Like many small, rural towns around the country, Concrete’s roughly 850 residents are a mix of those who have lived there all their lives and stay for the quiet, uncluttered lifestyle; some who fled the urban hubbub for the slower pace of the little town; and even those who ran away from Concrete to the excitement of the city, only to return when the promise of “more” wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

Valerie Stafford was born and raised in Concrete. Stafford, 59, left in 1975, noting that as a young adult, the town didn’t offer the kind of life she wanted.

But years later, she was drawn back to the town where she says people have a tight sense of community and identity.

“It doesn’t take as much work to get people excited about things and go out and get things done,” mused Stafford, who since moving to Concrete has helped spark renewed interest in promoting the town and organized the historic Ghost Walk in the fall, the Mardi Gras celebration in February and the Fall Color Festival in September.

Other people discovered Concrete while traveling or passing through and fell in love with its scenic landscape, located at the foot of the Cascades just off Highway 20 at the convergence of the Baker and Skagit rivers.

Sherrill Coville, who owns the gift shop Matty’s on Main in “uptown” Concrete and works as an insurance agent and licensing operator with the state Department of Licensing, became acquainted with the town in 1991. Her grandparents had owned a silver mine in the North Cascades National Park. She continued to visit regularly.

The towering forests, the river and wildlife, friendly people and slower pace of life convinced Coville to move permanently to Concrete from Shoreline in 2006.

Like many residents, Stafford and Coville both appreciate the area’s small-town atmosphere, a place where you know your neighbors and can escape gridlock traffic, strip malls and the constant rush of life.

But living in an economically depressed small town also brings with it a higher-than-average percentage of people living in poverty — more than 14 percent of the population, said Lou Hillman, Skagit County’s East County Resource Center coordinator who has lived there since 2002.

The resource center provides a mix of affordable health, development and other community services to the upriver rural population.

The upriver area, with its proximity to acres of dense forest and limited county sheriff patrols also attracts transients and the homeless, who set up camps or trailers in the woods, and sometimes makeshift drug labs or other drug operations, Hillman said.

“They can be tucked back away on a tiny piece of property in the middle of nowhere and nobody notices they’re there,” Hillman said.

Still others living in the town have embraced a close-to-the-land, off-the-grid lifestyle, a tradition that goes way back to a time when entrepreneurs trekked up along the Skagit River looking for gold in the mountains and instead found other valuable resources that helped shape the town’s destiny.

Cement foundation

Richard Challenger was one of the first pioneers to head up the Skagit River in search of gold in the northern Cascades, said Cheri Cook-Blodgett, treasurer of the Concrete Heritage Museum and longtime resident. Challenger homesteaded in the area on the west banks of the Baker River in 1888 and dubbed his small settlement Minnehaha.

Challenger sold his land in 1890 to Magnus Miller, another pioneer, who decided to change the name of the settlement to Baker, after the river. He founded the post office and platted the lots of what would become a thriving settlement.

Meantime, explorer Amasa Everett, known as “Peg Leg” for his one leg, settled on the east banks of the Baker River. While hiking in the mountains near Lake Shannon, Everett, a trained geologist, discovered the area was full of limestone and clay — two of the main ingredients for cement.

“At the time, Amasa was smart enough to know he’d found something better than gold,” Cook-Blodgett said, noting that at the time, the market for cement was beginning to boom.

Everett was able to secure financing from a bank in New York, founded the Washington-Portland Cement Plant in 1905 and named his settlement Cement City.

Then in 1908, an enterprising man named John Eden traveled to the area, saw the potential for big profits in the cement-making industry, and opened his own cement plant called the Superior Portland Cement Plant.

By the time the second plant was built in 1908, the leaders of Baker and Cement City decided to merge the towns into one and named it Concrete.

Hundreds of people came to work in the prosperous cement plants and surrounding timber mills. At one point, more than 2,000 people — mostly working men of all backgrounds — populated the area. A school was built, storefronts began popping up with supplies for workers, taverns enjoyed a bustling business, and homes were built.

Demand for cement soared, as the automobile became the premier form of transportation and the country was busy building roads. More workers headed up to Concrete to help construct the Skagit River Hydroelectric project to harness power for the City of Seattle at Newhalem in 1917, and later in 1925 for the building of Lower Baker Dam at the southern tip of Baker Lake.

Plenty of cement also had been used in the building of the Henry Thompson Bridge over the Baker River that was dedicated in 1918. At the time, it took the honor of being the longest single-arch concrete bridge in the world.

In the 1930s, Concrete became a one-cement-plant town when the Superior Portland Cement Plant bought out Washington-Portland, took over its plant and expanded. The company changed hands along the way and became the Lone Star Cement Plant.

But all the growth came with a cost, Cook-Blodgett said. Concrete citizens choked under a constant layer of cement dust that spewed from the plants.

Philip Moran, a 72-year-old rancher who was born near Concrete and whose family owned a ranch near Rockport, remembers the gray haze that clouded the town.

“It was on everything,” Moran said. “It was pretty difficult to get off of cars and things. You would go out of town three miles and things weren’t so bad.”

Eventually, overwhelming pollution and the plant’s inability to improve emissions forced its owners to close it, dealing a huge blow to the local economy.

The town then pinned its hopes and survival on its still-thriving timber industry.

Saved with timber

During the 1940s and ’50s, more than 20 shake, shingle and lumber mills dotted the town, including Superior Shake and Shingle, owned by millman Ray Drake’s father and located just off Highway 20 next to what is now Albert’s Red Apple Market.

Ray and his wife, Bonnie, moved to Concrete about 40 years ago to help Ray’s father run the mill.

Bonnie, now 75, who had grown up in Oso, thought she was moving to “the end of the Earth” when her husband brought her to the area.

But she quickly fit in, and she and Ray found themselves involved in most aspects of the community. Ray worked six and sometimes seven days a week at the mill and helped organize the Red Cedar Shake and Shingle Association of about 20 mills in eastern Skagit County.

The logging industry was going strong well into the 1980s, Ray Drake said from his home just outside of Concrete along the Skagit River.

Then strict federal forest regulations suddenly cut off the supply of lumber to the mills and put a stop to much of the logging on forest lands, decimating the local workforce and leaving much of Concrete’s population unemployed and struggling to find other occupations.

Federal and state job retraining programs were proposed, and to some extent taken advantage of. But the town began to deteriorate.

“Streets were going to pot; businesses shut down,” Cook-Blodgett said. She was working for the U.S. Forest Service at the time.

For the most part, many years would pass before Concrete began pulling itself up by its bootstraps and looking toward a different future, Hillman said.

A new town vision

In the 1990s, town leaders kick-started a concerted effort to hammer out a blueprint for the town’s development, Cook-Blodgett said.

Early visioning exercises produced a few tangible improvements, including the Concrete Heritage Museum, to preserve the town’s history; the building of the Sockeye Train, a renovated trolley that takes visitors on a tour of the town; and some renovations to the Henry Thompson Bridge.

Much later, the town received grant money for a new sewer system, and roughly $4 million to renovate part of Main Street and, once again, the bridge.

Last year, Concrete Town Council member and freelance writer Jason Miller began talking to town officials about chiseling out a vision for the town. Miller is in the process of starting up the Concrete Herald newspaper.

“I’d be sitting at a Town Council meeting and ideas would come from council members, citizens, the mayor — everybody has ideas,” Miller said. “But they’re not anything specific — they’re piecemeal, and they don’t feed into the greater whole.”

Miller broached the idea of a workshop for Concrete’s residents, council and Chamber of Commerce members to brainstorm ideas.

Then last September, Stafford, the chamber president, met with Rick Archuletta, a graduate student at Antioch University in Seattle, who was working on his thesis examining rural sustainable communities and wanted to use Concrete as his project focus.

Archuletta had grown up in a rural area of Hawaii, and was dismayed with how the area changed for the worse after its sugar cane business failed. The area suffered economically, and outside interests dictated the area’s growth, forcing many of the locals to move elsewhere.

“All the problems of traffic and waste disposal and water shortages; these people had no thought about sustainability that could keep them in the area and employed,” Archuletta said.

Archuletta had visited Concrete years ago while he was working for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers restoring habitat in the area.

Last fall, he began meeting with Concrete residents, asking questions about their desire to change the town.

Last month, Archuletta and Miller hosted an “Imagine Concrete” visioning workshop. About 40 people showed up to throw around ideas and define their priorities for the town’s future.

Many people listed cleaning up the town as a high priority, along with attracting business and industry and bolstering its economy. They also put better public safety, developing a tourist trade, creating more recreational opportunities and improving streets and sidewalks at the top of the list, Archuletta said.

Meantime, they all want to preserve Concrete’s small-town feel and history, he said.

Moran said the town has plenty of potential to boost its bottom line with tourist dollars and capitalize on its unique location at the convergence of two rivers.

“What other town can say it has a dam inside the city limits?” Moran said, while taking a recent stroll around town.

Moran pointed to a small piece of property at the east end of Main Street, where a few old buildings sit. He’d like to see the town sell the property for development, maybe to build a quality motel with a restaurant that overlooks the river and has a prime view of the mountains.

“You just don’t put a sign up to tell the tourists Concrete is over here,” Moran said with a sigh. “You have to give them something to see and a reason to stay.”

He’d also like to see the town consolidate its public service sites now scattered around the town and renovate some of its historic and crumbling buildings downtown.

Coville, the gift-shop owner, agrees. She’d like to see downtown — or “uptown” as the locals call it — become “quainter,” with renovated store fronts, more lighting and decoration.

“We could have a place that would be cute and quaint and attractive as people think of La Conner,” Coville said.

But many residents say the key to Concrete’s long-term survival will be attracting some kind of industry that would employ locals and provide a tax base to support its services.

Retail businesses have a tough time making it in Concrete, Coville said. The North Cascades Highway east of Concrete and Diablo usually closes for the winter, causing traffic to drop dramatically, she said.

And Hillman added that many industrial businesses would rather locate in a more populated area where there’s a larger and often better-trained workforce to draw from.

Many of Concrete’s residents commute to Burlington, Mount Vernon, Sedro-Woolley to work, or even farther to Bellingham, Everett or Seattle. The largest employer in the area is the school district. And some in Concrete are hoping they can find work at the new Janicki facility in Hamilton.

Town officials also are working to convince a provider to bring broadband or digital subscriber lines (DSL) into the area, which they say would make the town more attractive for businesses. Previous attempts have failed.

All of the ideas don’t take funding into account. But some residents hope the town can take advantage of the recent federal economic stimulus dollars to help give legs to their plans.

Anything to keep Concrete thriving for the next 100 years, they say.

“People up here are pretty proud of their community,” Moran said. “We just need to promote ourselves more.”

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Head up to Concrete for the town’s Centennial Celebration on Saturday, May 9. The schedule of events includes:

11 a.m. — Centennial Parade down Main Street

12:30 p.m. — Time capsule presented; town photo on Main Street

Noon to 3 p.m. — Kids’ games; 100 cake walk; special postage stamp issued at Town Park

2 to 4 p.m. — Old-time storytelling at the Senior Center, 45821 Railroad Ave.

2 to 6 p.m. — Photo/article exhibit of historic memories at the Concrete Theatre on Main Street

2 to 8 p.m. — Music at Town Park

n Information: 360-853-8401 or e-mail

• Beverly Crichfield can be reached at 360-416-2135 or .