Biohazard Cleanup Near Onalaska Historic District Onalaska, WA

Onalaska is an unincorporated community and census-designated place (CDP) in Lewis County, Washington — a different place from the larger city of the same name in Wisconsin.

Onalaska was founded in 1916, when the Carlisle Lumber Company built a sawmill there and laid out a town beside it.

The Carlisle company named the town after "Oonalaska" (Unalaska) in Alaska's Aleutian Islands, a name from Thomas Campbell's poem that the firm had already given to its mill towns in Wisconsin, Arkansas, and Texas.

The Carlisle mill at Onalaska grew into the largest lumber mill in Lewis County, capable at full capacity of cutting about 150,000 board feet of lumber a day.

Onalaska was the scene of a long, bitter labor dispute in the 1930s: during the 1935 Northwest lumber strike the company replaced strikers with a company union, and the strikers were reinstated only after a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1938 upholding the National Labor Relations Board.

The mill closed in 1942 and the plant was dismantled, but unlike many company towns Onalaska survived as a community, and the old mill's stack still stands at the edge of town.

The census counted 621 people in Onalaska in 2010 and 657 people in 2020.

Onalaska is served by its own school district, the Onalaska School District, and uses ZIP code 98570.