Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Oakville, WA

Oakville is a small city in Grays Harbor County that proudly carries the nickname "Timber Town, USA."

The city stands on open prairie that Native tribes once maintained with yearly fires set deliberately to keep back the forest and encourage camas, a staple food, before settlers arrived by canoe up the Chehalis River.

Oakville took its name from the Garry oak trees in the area: James Reed Harris, who led a party of families from Crawford County, Illinois, in the 1870s, applied for a post office that opened on December 31, 1873.

The city site was platted on September 27, 1887, the Northern Pacific Railway laid tracks through Oakville around 1890, and the city was officially incorporated on December 18, 1905.

In its lumber heyday, Oakville supported several mills at once — including the Oakville Lumber Company, Big Fir Lumber Company, Vance Lumber Company, and the Callow Mill in 1916 — and the city was noted for large shipments of cascara bark.

The historic Oakville State Bank, incorporated in 1909, is said to be the last bank in Washington to be robbed by a rider on horseback.

The 2020 census counted 715 residents in 267 households in Oakville, up slightly from 684 people in 260 households in 2010.

Oakville sits on the northern shore of the Chehalis River just downstream from the confluence of the Chehalis and Black rivers, in an area subject to annual flooding; major floods in 1996 and 2007 were both federally declared disasters.

The Chehalis apple, a possible offshoot of the Golden Delicious, was discovered growing near Oakville in 1937.

In August 1994, Oakville became briefly famous for the "Oakville blobs" — translucent, gelatinous blobs that rained from the sky, baffled state lab testing, and were never explained; the mystery was featured on Unsolved Mysteries, and no samples of the blobs remain.