The Methow Valley’s largest employer closed its doors forty-four years ago. Though it has a storied, 40-year history that includes murder, strikes and fires, all traces of its existence have vanished. There are adults born and living here who never saw it. We’re talking about what’s locally still known as the “Wagner Mill” in Twisp. It passed to other owners before closing for good in 1982, taking what’s variously estimated as 280 up to nearly 400 of the valley’s best-paying jobs with it.
It takes an imaginative eye to see that there ever was anything as large, busy and productive as the lumber mill with 300 by 200-foot buildings, a millpond and power plant on some 70 acres of property east of Highway 20, on the south end of Twisp. The mill sat on the now empty scrub-brush and sand, on property now owned by the Lloyd family, behind the late, lamented Coyote Ridge Automotive Repair and Sales and the Sportsman Motel. Its operations extended to the southern banks of the Methow River. In 1948, when the river flooded, the mill was inundated. !