24/7 Trauma & Biohazard Cleanup Near Longview Junction Kelso, WA

Kelso is a city in and the county seat of Cowlitz County, sitting on the east bank of the Cowlitz River directly across from its twin city of Longview, within the Longview metropolitan area.

Kelso became the Cowlitz County seat in 1922, taking the role from Kalama, which had held it since 1872.

Kelso was founded by Peter W. Crawford, a Scottish surveyor who in 1847 took up the first donation land claim on the lower Cowlitz River; he filed the townsite plat in October 1884 and named it after his hometown of Kelso, Scotland.

The city was incorporated in 1889, and its official motto is "City of Friendly People."

Kelso had a population of 12,720 at the 2020 census, living in 4,947 households with 5,217 housing units counted.

In its early logging-era days Kelso earned the nickname "Little Chicago" for its many taverns and brothels catering to loggers, which the FBI finally pressured the mayor to shut down in the 1950s and 1960s.

Kelso has been promoted since 1956 as the "Smelt Capital of the World" for the Cowlitz River's commercial smelt fishery, which shipped some 5,000 tons of fish in 1910 alone.

On January 3, 1923, the wooden Allen Street Bridge collapsed into the Cowlitz River during rush hour, killing 17 people in what remains the deadliest bridge disaster in Washington state history.

Kelso lies only about 24 miles from Mount St. Helens and was blanketed with ash in the May 18, 1980 eruption, whose mudflows filled the Cowlitz River; the city's Three Rivers Golf Course was built on volcanic ash dredged from the river.

The Aldercrest-Banyon landslide, which began creeping in March 1998 in east Kelso, eventually destroyed 129 houses and was declared a federal disaster, ranking among the costliest landslide disasters in United States history.