Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Samoa, CA

Samoa is a census-designated place in Humboldt County, California, occupying the northern peninsula of Humboldt Bay about 1.5 miles northwest of Eureka, at an elevation of 23 feet.

The community began as Brownsville, named for dairy farmer James D. H. Brown, whose ranch was established on the site in 1859 and who became the first permanent white settler on Humboldt Bay's north peninsula.

In the 1890s the town was renamed Samoa because its harbor was thought to resemble the harbor of Pago Pago, during the contemporary crisis in the Samoan Islands.

The Vance Lumber Company built a large sawmill at Samoa in 1892; when Andrew B. Hammond bought it in 1900 it was the largest sawmill in Humboldt County, and the Samoa post office opened in 1894.

Samoa is one of only two intact lumber company towns in northwestern California, and its history is inseparable from the Hammond Lumber Company, which took that name in 1912.

The Samoa Cookhouse, begun in 1893, is one of the last remaining original lumber camp-style cookhouses, still serving hearty family-style meals at long communal tables.

During World War I, the Hammond company built an emergency shipyard at Samoa that built seven wooden steamships between 1917 and 1919.

Georgia-Pacific bought the Samoa mill complex in 1956 and added a pulp mill in 1965; the last old-growth timber was milled in 1980, and the pulp mill closed for good in 2010.

The 2020 census counted 229 residents in Samoa, down from 258 in 2010.

Samoa has 87 households with an average size of 2.63 people, and — a legacy of its company-town past — nearly 60 percent of its homes are renter-occupied.