Well, now it means community.
Great place to live.
One word, home, I guess.
It's a friendly little town.
Hell.
Um, the one word for me would be home.
All Alaska's all I've ever known is home, so.
Be home.
Family.
Enjoyment.
I want to say great, and I want to say home.
It's just, I'm so glad I spent the last 50 years here.
This community is real.
They are not phony.
They don't pretend to be people that they're not.
When they come into your shop and they start talking to you, they're exactly who they are.
They're kind.
They are loving.
I don't hear people back talk about other people.
They just celebrate the fact that they live in a beautiful, rural community with clean
air and that they can love and share with the community.
And I just can't imagine being a part of a business community that's more friendly and
more real and more honest than what we have right here.
I probably would say that if you don't have a job here, you're really hurting, and we
don't, we just have two small industries here.
So it would have to be, but there's people that lack them for some reason that I don't
know, but they drive clear to Olympia and to Coleman Seattle from here.
So there must be something here, and I think it's mostly the schools.
They have a real fine school system, and I think that's what they want the kids out of the cities.
I just love Alaska.
The loyalty to this community means a lot to me.
I am true blue, purple, and gold.
I'll do anything for my school.
We have a wonderful school and school district, teachers, everybody.
And the people in the community are very supportive, and they have been excellent to me.
I've had a couple hardships in my life, and the whole community came out and supported me,
helped me raise my kids.
And I am so thankful that I have family here that supports me and friends.
And I just want to give back to the community that's gave so much to me.
Well, I think a small community like Alaska offers a lot that larger cities can't.
For instance, there's usually cheaper housing.
Like here, there's more land available.
The average Joe could come out here and buy a 5 or 10 acre piece of property and have a little patch of timber.
They could have their own little picnic areas on their property, raise huge gardens, that kind of thing.
You're not that far from Portland and Seattle.
You're not that far from some lesser sized cities to go out, commute and go to work.
But if you wanted to come and you had an entrepreneur type spirit and you wanted to come and start a local business,
then you actually get to be the foundation part of actually growing a community by actually providing a service to a community
and joining a partnership with other small businesses and then with the greater communities as a whole.
Small communities have great opportunity with the local schools that they have.
Something huge like inner cities really struggle with.
And where parents and people in the community are actively involved in the school.
So yeah, just the natural resource base of streams and rivers and bird watching, fishing, hiking, snow sports in the winter, we don't have to go far.
Music
There'd be the Carlisle Lumber Company in the middle.
You know, the largest inland sawmill in the world.
They'd ship out 40 carloads of lumber a day.
Not just old boards, but if you give any houses, you'll see the stamp Carlisle Lumber Company on Alaska, Washington.
I've got a few souvenirs of that and I sell a few that I've collected to artists that they make picture frames and stuff out of it.
The logging business was it.
You know, he had five steam engines that's 70 miles of his own railroad.
It was hooked on to the Burlington Northern Railroad in Appalachian.
Big business.
Music
I've never gone to any other school besides on Alaska.
So I don't know any different, but my cousins actually go to Shehalis and in his graduating class, there'll be 250 students.
In my graduating class, there'll be about 45 to 50.
So it's a it's a big difference, but I love it.
I like to know everyone.
I like to know what's going on with everyone else's lives.
It's just we're a family here.
It was wonderful because for the rest of my life, as long as I lived here, I knew people and I not only knew their mothers.
And fathers.
But now I know the children or the grownups that I had in school.
I always just feel like on Alaska is kind of like kinfolk, you know, like all those third, fourth cousins.
You've got out there someplace that you don't know.
I kind of feel that way about the people in Alaska.
Music
So a lot of things that high schoolers do for fun is we go to the high school sports games like soccer, football, volleyball this time of year, basketball later on in the year.
We just recently had our spirit week for homecoming.
So we have that in dances because we're in a rural area.
There's a lot of trails in the woods that you go on.
So you can ride four wheelers, that sort of thing out there, you know, fishing, hunting, all that sort of stuff.
I worked with the Little League and Dirtle softball for 32 years.
And we've come up with four good fields and they're still improving the field.
Music
You know, when we first moved here, we had a theater and that of course closed down.
But we had some of the best movies here that they had before some of the bigger places had them.
And that was great.
The change was when the mail went out and we had everything here.
Dry cleaners, shoe repair, dry goods, grocery store, theaters, we had everything here.
And there are a lot of people from Chehalis come out here to see their movies
because it was such great sound effects.
We used to have a JCPenney store and we had all them things.
When Carlisle's mill was in, they had all that stuff here.
I liked that, of course.
But basically we went to Chehalis for shopping.
Yeah, we used to come down here when my husband and I went together.
We came down every Saturday night to the movies.
Music
It's one of the cheaper places to live and I'd like to see it stay as it is.
I don't want to see nothing developed.
It's pretty just the way it is.
Because when you start developing it's going to cost you more money.
I see a lot of us high schoolers now.
I think that we'll eventually return here because it's just so nice to have a family here and raise their kids here.
So I see us returning here and us raising our kids here.
I definitely plan on coming back here even if I do go to WSU or somewhere a little bit of a distance away.
I definitely want to come back and raise my family here.
And I see Onalaska growing a lot.
I mean a lot of the kids in my graduating class plan to stay here and want to open businesses here.
Whether it's a big business or just take over their grandparent's dairy farm.
Yeah, I see it growing.
Music
I moved to Onalaska in 1981 when I married my husband Pete Murphy.
He was from here.
I always wanted to live in the outdoors.
I always loved the rural lifestyle in the country and I wanted to raise my family where they could play outside
and enjoy the beautiful nature that we have around us.
And that Onalaska just provided that for me.
So I'm also a teacher and I've been teaching at the school for a long time.
Both of our kids graduated from here and had just good experiences in the school and the community here.
Music
From the very beginning our mission was to overall reduce poverty.
But we also wanted to bring our community together through community celebrations.
Kind of promote our rural lifestyle.
And then through that process we were able to purchase the lake that we're standing on now, Carlisle Lake.
A 72 acre piece of land with a beautiful 22 acre lake.
And so we started developing this as a community park.
Then of course the other project that the Onalaska Alliance does is the Alpaharvist Festival.
And that was one of the projects that came out of the community meetings through the Horizons Project also.
Music
Music
