Lester's school district was dissolved into Enumclaw's under a 1985 state law. Nobody lives in the town now, and it is still on the district's map.

On Saturday, April 27, 1985, the Washington State Senate took up the final version of a bill about school district boundaries. Senator Alex Deccio, a Republican from Yakima County, had one question for its sponsor. "Senator Gaspard, how much money are we talking about to fund the school of Lester?"

Senator Marcus Gaspard of Sumner said his recollection was "about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, roughly." He did not say over what period. The bill passed, 26 to 22.

Lester was a railroad town on the upper Green River, about 23 miles due east of Enumclaw and behind a gate the City of Tacoma kept locked. By HistoryLink's account it had 24 residents and a school with six students. The governor signed the bill on May 20. The Lester School District was then dissolved and its territory annexed to Enumclaw's, where it remains. The order itself was not found for this piece; the accounts that describe the dissolution put it in 1985. Nobody has lived in Lester since 2002. On the state's map the townsite still belongs to Enumclaw School District No. 216.

A town for pushing trains

The Northern Pacific opened its tunnel under Stampede Pass in 1888, a story told in this site's piece on the Stampede Tunnel. The climb to it was steep enough that heavy trains needed extra locomotives, called helpers, and the railroad kept them at a station on each side of the summit: Easton on the east and Weston on the west, at the tunnel's mouth. In 1891, by HistoryLink's account, the railroad moved the station a few miles down the valley, and the new stop took the name of a telegraph operator, Lester Hansacker.

By 1915 Lester had a depot, a six-stall roundhouse, a coal dock, a school, a hotel, a tavern, a store and a post office. Its peak population is disputed. HistoryLink and the Seattle Times put the peak near 1,000 in the 1920s. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, in 1993, said 300 in 1927. The state Supreme Court, in 1965, counted "some 650 people in 1930" in the entire watershed.

Diesels, then a gate

The railroad tested a diesel over the pass in 1940 and bought its first ones for regular service in 1944. Within fifteen years steam was gone, and so was the reason for a roundhouse in the woods. A 1970 Seattle Times feature found a Scott Paper camp of 100 loggers at the edge of town, and put the geography in a sentence: "The town is directly east of Enumclaw, but the access road lies in Tacoma's watershed and is barricaded by the Tacoma Water Department."

Tacoma has drunk from the Green River since 1913, as this site's piece on the Green River pipeline explains, and its water utility's own chronology says it began buying private land in the watershed in 1954. In October 1960 a locked gate went up at the headworks on the road west. On July 3, 1962, a crew from King County cut the gate free, all 500 pounds of it, chained it to a county truck and drove off. The county sued and lost. In February 1965 a unanimous state Supreme Court let Tacoma condemn 1,450 acres along the river, and in 1967 the Northern Pacific sold the city the townsite itself for $37,000. Residents were given leases for life that could not be handed down. Each house came down as it emptied.

The city did more than wait. The Court of Appeals wrote in 1984 that "the City sought to reduce Lester's population by restricting the employment opportunities of Lester residents." Logging companies were warned they would lose the use of the road if they hired anyone who lived in town. Ronald Duranceau, who lost a job offer that way in 1978, sued, and a jury awarded him $40,000.

The school that outlived the town

The school was dedicated on January 10, 1954, and the next morning's Post-Intelligencer priced it at $192,490.51 and reported it "Built without a cent of federal or state aid," with help from the district's two largest property owners, the railroad and Scott Paper. HistoryLink gives $175,000 and calls it private contributions. It opened with 31 pupils, four teachers and a high school of eight, "not boys enough even for a basketball team." By 1970 the superintendent, Jerry Metcalf, was also running the town waterworks and teaching ceramics.

Scott Paper closed its camp in 1978. Burlington Northern stopped running trains over the pass in 1983 by HistoryLink's account, 1984 by Tacoma Water's. The school kept going. HistoryLink describes it in those years as the town's largest employer, with a staff of five and six students who were the children of two of its own employees.

It could afford to. The state budget for 1983 to 1985 allotted any district of 100 or fewer students three certificated staff units, the budget's term for the cost of a full-time licensed educator, for kindergarten through sixth grade and another for seventh and eighth, and set no minimum number of children. HistoryLink adds that the district's local money came from property taxes, which made the City of Tacoma its largest contributor. John Phillips III, the railroad historian behind the HistoryLink essay, wrote in the White River Valley Museum's journal in 2007 that with "almost unlimited funds and a tiny population, the school showed every sign of going on indefinitely," and that the board had taken to hiring young teachers with large families.

Fewer than five

State law already had a floor. A district that averaged fewer than two pupils was to be dissolved. Senate Bill 4142, introduced by Gaspard in February 1985 at the State Board of Education's request, was a housekeeping bill about the committees that settle district boundaries, and it left that number alone. The Senate passed it 39 to 7.

The House Education Committee changed "two" to "five." Representative Eugene Lux of King County moved to make it fifteen and lost, 36 to 59. A conference committee, the panel of both chambers that settles their differences, then narrowed the test to pupils in kindergarten through eighth grade, applied it to "the 1984-85 school year," gave regional superintendents thirty days to report any district under the line, and declared an emergency so it took effect at once. The text left the regional committee no choice about a district so reported: it "shall dissolve the school district and annex the territory thereof to some other district or districts."

HistoryLink credits the bill to Representative Art Wang of Tacoma. Wang signed the committee report, spoke against the fifteen-pupil version, sat on the conference committee and spoke for final passage; the bill was Gaspard's, and the House and Senate journals do not record who wrote the amendment. Phillips wrote that the final version touched "only two districts in the entire state" and does not name the other. This site did not find Lester's official count for that year. Six students of all ages and fewer than five below high school can both be true.

Another act approved the same day ordered the state superintendent to propose a formula giving "adequate but not excessive funding" to districts with fewer than 25 students.

What Enumclaw got

HistoryLink says the school, once inside the Enumclaw district, "could no longer sustain itself and was closed," and that Enumclaw "quickly sold the school property to the City of Tacoma." Tacoma's chronology records the purchase but not the seller. It has Tacoma Water buying the school in 1986 and the school and the Scott Paper logging camp demolished in 1987. It gives no price.

By Phillips's account the dying district handed Enumclaw "hundreds of thousands of dollars and a Snow Cat marked 'Lester School Bus'" on its way out. That sentence appears in his museum article and again in HistoryLink, and it is the only source this site found for the machine. No figure for the money turned up, and no record of what the Enumclaw district did with a tracked snow vehicle.

Lester's residents held a funeral for the town around a mock tombstone that, as HistoryLink quotes it, dated the death to May 22, 1985, and blamed "the pen of Gov. Booth Gardner." The published laws of that session date his approval two days earlier. Lester's was, as far as this site can tell, the last district Enumclaw absorbed, ten years after Black Diamond, whose story is in the piece on the plateau's one-room schools.

The last one out

Gertrude Murphy was teaching on the upper Green River by 1929. She retired from the Highline district in 1963 and went back to work at the Lester school. HistoryLink says she sat on its board and went to Olympia in 1985 to stop the closure. Her house burned on December 26, 1993, when she was 90, and a Post-Intelligencer reporter found her at the rubble. "I fought to save this town, to keep it going, but they killed it, and now it's gone," she said. She spent later summers in a cabin a mile and a half off that she called "a suburb of Lester," and died in an Everett nursing home on September 29, 2002, at 99.

What is there now

Very little, and you may not go and look. Tacoma Water's 2008 watershed plan, still posted on the utility's website, describes an entry gate on the Forest Service road at Friday Creek, on the Stampede Pass side of the townsite, and states the rule: "General recreational access to the watershed is only allowed east of the gate at Friday Creek." The Washington Trails Association's page for the old town carries the consequence: "This hike is closed to public access. Visitors to this area may be ticketed." As late as 2015 a newspaper columnist walked in from the gate and found the ruins of a warehouse and, still standing, a guard house and a yellow dormitory. Notes added to the town's Atlas Obscura page in May 2017 and July 2018 report those gone too.

The district line is still there. The state school superintendent's boundary map, King County's and the Census Bureau's each place the Lester townsite inside the Enumclaw School District, which by the county's mapping covers about 450 square miles and stops at the crest near Stampede Pass. The district on the other side is Easton's, named for the other helper town.

The rule is still law, too. Since 2015 the test has been three straight years with fewer than five pupils in kindergarten through eighth grade. Lester was given the year it was already in.