SAPPHO – The Sappho Junction cafe, store and gas station, the last remnant of a once-bustling logging camp on the western Olympic Peninsula, has been destroyed by fire.
The business at the junction of U.S. 101 and Highway 113 about 40 miles west of Port Angeles was engulfed in flame by the time firefighters from nearby Beaver arrived about 12:45 a.m. Monday, officials said.
“It was just a ghost town,” said Sue Price, whose family once owned the establishment. “Now there’s nothing left for the ghosts.”
Forks Fire Chief Phil Arbeiter said the structure was a total loss, but there was no immediate dollar estimate. Owner Sam Gaydeski of Beaver could not be reached for comment Monday.
The cause of the fire was under investigation.
The building was Sappho’s unofficial community center almost from the time it was opened in the 1920s, starting as a home with gasoline pumps in front.
Price, now a bookkeeper in Forks, said her grandmother, Elizabeth Schmidt, bought it in 1932 and added a garage.
Her parents, owners Bud and Jane McStotts, often placed her cradle in the front window.
“I was raised by everybody who came in,” Price said. “It was amazing how many people knew me, how many people said, ‘I remember when you were just a little thing running up and down the counter.’”
When Schmidt retired and left the business to Price’s parents in the 1950s, they closed the garage but added a restaurant. Soon scores of loggers were placing lunch orders in the evening and lining up in the morning for the food to sustain themselves in the woods.
“She made homemade bread for their sandwiches,” Price said. “She made pies and cookies.”
Sappho was a Bloedel-Donovan town, then was sold to Rayonier. Price recalled a time when there were 20 homes, a tavern, bunkhouses and an office building.
“There were lots of loggers until the Sappho camp closed down,” Price said. “I remember as a little girl that at night all the logging crew buses would line up there.”
As logging faded, her father ran the restaurant until 1985, Price said. She ran it herself for three more years, then leased it out and finally sold it in 1992 to Jim and Betty Smith, who turned it into a store.
By the time they sold it to Gaydeski two years later, Sappho was barely a memory.
“The whole spirit of the place just changed,” Price said. “It kind of became an abandoned town. It kept getting smaller and smaller.
“Now it’s just a junction.”
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