Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Ryderwood, WA

Ryderwood is a census-designated place (CDP) in Cowlitz County, Washington, west of the city of Vader, known locally as the 'Village in the Woods.'

Ryderwood began in 1923 as a logging settlement built by the Long-Bell Lumber Company on a site originally called Cougar Flats, at a construction cost of about $1.5 million — at the time the largest community built entirely with private funding.

The town was named for W. F. ('Uncle Bill') Ryder, Long-Bell's logging operations manager, who had come to the Northwest to locate a timber source.

Unlike a temporary logging camp, Ryderwood was planned as a permanent family town with a school, church, and theater and was promoted as a 'modern logging town'; its timber fed the new Long-Bell mills at Longview, founded the same year.

At its peak Ryderwood was the third-largest community in Cowlitz County, with about 2,000 residents, more than 400 single-family homes, its own high school, and even its own hospital.

As old-growth timber ran out and harvesting technology changed, Long-Bell sold the entire town in 1953 to Senior Estates, Inc. for $96,000, to be remade as a retirement community for pensioners.

Buyers in the new Ryderwood were required to be retired, and services such as the fire department, library, and water system were run by resident volunteers; today the community is managed by the Ryderwood Improvement and Service Association, a nonprofit homeowners association.

Ryderwood is now a retirement community oriented to residents 55 and older: at the 2010 census nearly 70 percent of residents were 65 or older and the median age was 68.7 years.

The CDP is remarkably compact — just 0.16 square miles — yet it held 395 people in 221 households at the 2010 census, its first census appearance, and 383 people at the 2020 census.

Ryderwood Lake, a 6-acre pond built in 1956 inside an old gravel pit, borders the town along with Campbell Creek, the community's main water source, and Becker Creek to the west.