Like many other small Tillamook County communities, Mohler has lived through a lot of changes in its short history.
Small family farms, which were once so numerous and so commonplace throughout the Nehalem River country, are nearly extinct now - swallowed up by ever larger farms, ever larger acreages using the most modern machinery available.
The cheese factories, like the schools, consolidated years ago, and the fishing here, as elsewhere in the county and the state, will never again be what it once was. The lumber in-dustry, still the economic backbone and barometer of this area, has seen some drastic temperature changes - from a warm period of relative abundance, to the disastrous Tillamook Burn, to a time of slow recovery and transition, and now the cold chill of the present slumping wood products market.
The Mohler post office closed its doors several years ago. The railroad line still runs through the town, but trains don't stop here any more. The roads are better than ever before, black-top pavement with wide shoulders, and a new bridge spans the Nehalem at the east edge of town.
“The people who are supporting this place aren't the farmers any more," Blaine Huffman, who manages the Mohler Co-op Store, said of his business. "Once our main business was hay and feed. Gradually it has drifted over more and more to groceries. We're here to cater to the local residents and weekenders."
The Mohler Co-op, which expanded a little over a year and half ago to allow more room for grocery shelves and a meat counter, has changed with the times. While it still caters to area farmers and their families a healthy percentage of its customers are non-farmers, local residents or weekenders who have found the Co-op a reasonable place to do their grocery shopping.
Huffman has taken over management responsibility from his parents, Earl and Rose Huffman, who first managed the Co-op store when it went into operation more than 15 years ago. "Our prices are metro," he pointed out. While he can't compete with some of the specials that larger chain stores can offer, his everyday shelf prices are the same as those found in Tillamook or Portland.
"The small farms have been going slowly ever since I've been here," Huffman said. His family's business has changed to meet the shifting tide, and survived.
The Mohler Co-op Store is healthy, Huffman reported, and doing a good business even though the overall economy of the area doesn't look very good these days.
While the Co-op is the town's busiest commercial enterprise, one of the newest and most unique businesses in Mohler is the Nehalem Bay Winery. Owned by Pat McCoy, it began operations in 1974. Large signs on the shoulders of Highway 101 from Garibaldi to Nehalem advertise its location and bring a new breed to the streets of the community - tourists.
The winery is part of the regionally and nationally famous Tillamook County Cheese, Food and Wine Tour. Some 65,000 visitors toured the facility last year, where they get a complete explanation and first-hand look at the wine-making process, and an opportunity to taste the fruit, berry, and grape varieties that Nehalem Bay Winery has to offer.
The business, which has seen a 40 percent increase in sales in recent years, was built in the rustic remains of the old Mohler Cheese Factory.
In 1894, the famous Peter McIntosh made an appearance in north Tillamook County. He was a cheesemaker from Canada, well versed in the art of making cheddar cheese, and he offered to share his knowledge with the dairy farmers if they would pool their milk. McIntosh's arrival marked the beginning of the county's flourishing cheese industry, and in turn, the Mohler Cooperative Creamery Company.
Some of the well known cheesemakers who worked in Mohler during the first half of this century were August Grab, Harold Fogg, Alfred Long, and Tiny Lommen. Casper Huber and Harold Hirn were helpers for long periods. Hugh Sheldon was the last cheesemaker at the Mohler factory before it closed in 1969 and consolidated with the Tillamook Cheese Factory in Tillamook.
Aside from the two small ceramics shops in Mohler, the only other commercial enterprise in the town is the Laura B. Pub, located just across the new bridge that spans the Nehalem River on Highway 53.
Laura B. Crawford is the owner and operater of the pub, which she and her husband, Bob Crawford, purchased from Frank and Esther MacLeod.
Laura Crawford recalled that she and her husband first arrived in the Nehalem River country in 1947. Bob was logging in salvage operations on the Tillamook Burn and she worked at a tavern in Nehalem. Later, they bought the pub in Mohler, and after their marriage broke up she continued to run the business.
There have been a lot of changes in Mohler and the surrounding area in those years, Crawford commented. Many of her customers are still loggers and men working in wood products industries, but a new crowd is frequenting her bar for their beer and slugging quarters into her two pool tables - weekenders, people with summer homes in the area, tourists.
"We call 'em flat-landers," she said.
"There's more things coming in too," she said, "like antique stores and the ceramics shops. There are more business like that coming into the area.
The Laura B. Pub gets a steady flow of customers, despite the depressed state of the lumber industry and despite its location off the beaten path. One good gage of this business are the 52 caps arranged on shelves behind her bar. In February of this year, a customer left his cap behind and Crawford left it on the shelf for him to collect if he ever returned. He never did.
Later, a second cap was left on her counter. When its owner returned he told her to keep it and start a collection. Since then the gathering of caps has grown geometrically, filling up the space on the wall behind her bar.
Mohler came into being in 1911 when a man named E. E. Lytle built a railroad through the place and established a depot. He applied for a post office at the site and named it after A. L. Mohler, a prominent railroad official of the time, who was once the president of Union Pacific Railroad.
Once the railroad was built, the town came into being. The first grocery store, operated by Alva Finley, opened its doors. A feed store was established, the cheese factory flourished, Ernest Worthington had a livery stable, and a church and school house went up a short distance down the Tideland Road.
For all its history, though, Mohler has never been much larger than it is today. Lying just two miles off of Highway 101, and bordering Highway 53, the town sees a lot more traffic these days than ever before, but the number of permanent residents remains much the same.
Since its earliest days, Mohler has been a town intimately related to its neighbors in Nehalem and Wheeler and Manzanita. A separate identity is hard to locate. The dairy farmers are more residents of the Nehalem River valley than residents of Mohler. The loggers may shop at the Co-op and have a drink at the pub, but not many live in the town's immediate vicinity. The "flat-landers" are new to this place, without strong ties to the land or the community.
The town has changed as the county has changed. Never a leading voice, but still a member of the choir, the history of north Tillamook County has been and will continue to be the history of Mohler as well.
