Brookfield, Washington

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Brookfield, Washington was a small salmon-canning town on the Columbia River in Wahkiakum County. It existed from 1873 to 1957 and grew around the J.G. Megler Company’s Brookfield Fisheries. The cannery was named after Nellie E. Megler’s birthplace, North Brookfield, Massachusetts, and drew workers from several backgrounds, including Croatian fishermen from Komiza and seasonal Chinese canning crews. A post office opened in 1874 with Joseph G. Megler as postmaster.

Nearby, the Finke Brothers started a barrel factory around 1880, but the mill burned in 1923 and moved to Kalama. Brookfield had a one-room school starting in 1888, expanded to two rooms around 1924. The town was only reachable by boat and served as a regular ferry stop between Astoria, Oregon and Portland. The Megler Mansion loomed over the bay.

The cannery burned on July 17, 1931 and was not rebuilt, starting a long decline. By the late 1930s only a few families remained, and the school closed after 1945. Crown Zellerbach bought the land for timber in 1951, built a road to connect Brookfield to the state road system, and the post office closed in 1954; by 1957 the town was bulldozed to protect the timber from fire.

In 2017, Jim Crow Point and Jim Crow Creek were renamed Brookfield Point and Harlows Creek. Today Brookfield sits in a sheltered bay on the north side of the Columbia River. The bay once had a wide sandy beach and a cannery dock, but Crown Zellerbach later filled part of it to create a log dump, and dredging created hillocks used for four-wheeling. The population varied with the salmon season, and the community changed over time—from Croatian cannery workers to a mix of Indigenous and Austrian-Hungarian fishermen.