It’s been known by many names: the White Plague, or White Death, the “wasting disease”, TB for short, consumption, because of how it seemed to literally consume its victim from the inside out. Up until a cure was finally created in the early 1950s, tuberculosis had been running rampant for thousands of years, making it one of the oldest enemies of mankind in human history, having killed an estimated one billion people over the last two centuries alone. What made it especially dangerous wasn’t just its lethality, but its stealth: airborne, invisible, and able to pass from one set of lungs to another with nothing more than a cough. With no cure in sight, communities had no medical defense other than isolation, sparking the rapid creation of specialized sanatoriums across the country, including right here in Lewis County.
The Rock Creek Home in McCormick
Long before it became a place of healing, the unincorporated community of McCormick, just three miles west of Pe Ell, was first a place of industry. Employing an estimated 300 workers, the McCormick Lumber Mill was the economic heartbeat of the town. Over the years, the mill survived three devastating major fires, the last of which came in 1909, when the entire plant was destroyed. Each time, the company rebuilt, drawing on its considerable timber holdings.
Even the stock market collapse of October 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression didn’t immediately sink it. In the end, it would be owner Charles R. McCormick’s own overspending, overexpansion, and poor business management that would be its undoing, ultimately resulting in bankruptcy, with the mill being dismantled in 1931. Like so many other mill towns across the country, McCormick watched its jobs disappear, and its residents move on.
From the ashes of the town’s industrial era emerged a vital new purpose, and it was on that same stretch of land that Lewis County built its answer to the tuberculosis crisis. On October 29, 1935, Governor Clarence D. Martin addressed the crowd gathered to open the county’s newly completed sanitarium at the Rock Creek Home. The event was a regional affair, with the Eastern Star women of Pe Ell hosting a dinner for 150 people who traveled from towns across the region. Local officials enlivened the celebration with music and song, including county commissioners like Chairman James Tucker playing the fiddle and Guy Balfour singing and playing the piano.
The new facility was indeed worth celebrating, representing both a public?health investment and a practical cost-saving endeavor. Owned jointly by Lewis and Pacific counties and overseen by Dr. Angus MacMillan, construction cost $20,000, funding a brand-new 24-bed medical ward alongside remodeled company-town buildings that brought total capacity to 40. By caring for local citizens close to home, the county saved $100 per month, operating at just $5 per week per patient.
Rock Creek Home operated until 1941, and by then McCormick itself had faded into little more than a memory of its sawmill heyday. But the site’s story didn’t end there. The old sanitarium building found new life as the McCormick Feed Store, opened by Robert Phillips, who celebrated the grand opening by giving away ten free chickens for every ten pounds of feed purchased. Ronald and Lois Marie Phillips later carried on the operation alongside a nearby mini-mart, running the feed store and sawmill together for years before the commercial business eventually closed its doors for good prior to Lois Phillips passing away in 2013. Today, the site lives on mostly through local memory, with the old logging history of the area still traceable along the Willapa Hills State Park Trail.
The MacMillan Sanatorium in Chehalis
While the Rock Creek Home served the western part of the county, a second major facility took shape south of Chehalis along the Jackson Highway in the community of Forest. The location’s history as a safety net stretched back to the late 1890s, when a county poor farm was established here in the Newaukum Valley to house destitute, disabled, or legally troubled individuals. During the Great Depression, the site was rebuilt as the Forest Manor Retirement Home to replace the aging poorhouse infrastructure, but sadly it didn’t stay in operation for long. It sat vacant for years until the aforementioned Dr. MacMillan purchased it, adding new wings and a nurses’ house before reopening it in 1943 as the MacMillan Sanatorium for tuberculosis patients.
Operating through the peak years of the epidemic, the sanatorium bridged the gap before modern antibiotics finally conquered the disease, before officially closing in 1954. Following its tenure as a TB hospital, the campus transitioned into a nursing home through the early 1970s. By 1975, the grounds returned to their roots as a retirement home known once again as Forest Manor. In more recent years, the building has found new life as a shelter for women and children, first operating as Safe Family Ministries before becoming Set Free NW in September of 2019.
The stories of Rock Creek Home and MacMillan Sanatorium are chapters in a larger, often painful history in a time when isolation was the only defense against an invisible killer, and communities scrambled to build places that could hold the sick apart from the healthy. Yet those same buildings also tell a quieter story about resilience and reuse. From a reimagined lumber mill site near McCormick to a former poor farm south of Chehalis, both properties outlived their original purpose, adapting again to whatever the community needed next. Long after the White Plague faded from memory, these transformed grounds remain living testaments to a county that always found a way to take care of its own.
