Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Morton, WA

Morton is a city in Lewis County in the western Cascade foothills of southwestern Washington, north of Riffe Lake and near Mount Rainier National Park, at the junction of U.S. Route 12 and State Route 7.

The Morton site was once Wa-sa, a village of the Upper Cowlitz people, and was first settled by non-indigenous emigrants in 1871, many of them from Kentucky.

The community was named in 1889 for Levi P. Morton, Vice President under Benjamin Harrison, and was officially incorporated on January 7, 1913.

A July 1924 fire destroyed 19 commercial buildings across 18 blocks of downtown Morton, sparing most homes but leveling the Arcade Theater and two general stores.

Logging and timber processing built Morton — in the 1950s it was known as the "tie mill capital of the world," with the world's longest railroad tie dock running along its tracks.

Morton is famous for the Morton Loggers' Jubilee, a logging-show festival begun in the late 1930s and billed as the "granddaddy of all logging shows," featuring competitive logging contests, bed and lawnmower races, and a Jubilee Queen coronation.

A wooden lumberjack sculpture named "Big Ole" welcomes visitors to Morton; the original was carved in 1983 and a cedar replacement was completed in 2025.

The Roxy Theater, a 1938 movie house in downtown Morton that sat dormant from 1980, was restored by the Fire Mountain Arts Council and reopened for films and live productions.

Gust Backstrom Park, on the Tilton River at Morton's east side, hosted the town's first schoolhouse in 1896 and is used by the state to deliver migrating Chinook salmon around the Cowlitz River dams.

The White Pass Highway through Morton was relocated in December 1967 after the filling of Riffe Lake behind Mossyrock Dam drowned the old route.