A generation ago, some folks wrote off the timber towns of Washington’s North Olympic Peninsula. Far too many of the mills that anchored paychecks and Main Streets for a century were closing. The story people told about places like Forks and Port Angeles, and hundreds of rural communities like them across the country, was a story of managed decline.
That story was wrong. Today, with AI poised to reshape the job market, communities here are dedicating local resources to new use and preparing people for the jobs of the future.
This week, we are visiting Port Angeles and Forks, alongside colleagues from across the country, as part of The Brookings-AEI Commission on U.S. Rural Prosperity. We’re not coming to dispense answers. We’re coming to listen, understand challenges and identify lessons for other rural American communities.
We come at this from opposite ends of the political map and opposite ends of the country. One of us is a Democrat who spent years representing the Peninsula in Congress; the other is a Republican who governed New Hampshire, a state of small towns and independent people. We serve on this commission because rural communities deserve to be seen not with nostalgia for the past but with hope for the future. That’s not a partisan project; it’s an American one.
The commission has held hearings and site visits in states across America, and we keep hearing that communities don’t want pity or to be studied. They want trust in local leadership, access to capital, and the practical scaffolding — childcare, transportation and training — that turns an opportunity into a job someone can take. Where those three come together, rural economies grow.
You can see it on the Olympic Peninsula, where a community is putting its own assets to work. The Port of Port Angeles is an economic engine sitting on a deep-water harbor. It turned a shuttered mill site into a marine trades park and built out a composites campus where aerospace suppliers and boat builders can grow. Peninsula College is preparing local people for the jobs of the future and the innovation is real: The Makah Tribe’s new sawmill is turning locally abundant hemlock into advanced cross-laminated timber and homes for tribal families.
We would be doing the Peninsula a disservice, though, if we pretended the path was easy. The headwinds are real here, too. Much of the land base is publicly owned. While Olympic National Park draws visitors and opportunities few places can match, public ownership also limits the private land available for housing and industry, and the tax base that funds critical services.
Too often, Washington has treated rural places as problems to be managed rather than assets to be invested in and has designed programs with population thresholds and rigid rules that shut out small communities. The Peninsula is proving, however, that when a different approach is taken, they can lead the way.
The harder question is what comes next. Federal seed money can start something remarkable, but it cannot finish it — particularly when programs are being cut. That’s where private capital and philanthropy can matter. The Rockefeller Foundation has committed $100 million to connect people to good jobs in some of the country’s most distressed communities, many of them rural. Philanthropy cannot substitute for public investment, and should not try, but it can take risks government cannot and help models that work here reach scale.
Rural America grows our food, harvests our timber, and generates much of our energy. The Peninsula still has a long road ahead, but stand in Port Angeles today and you’ll see something exciting: a community betting on itself. That’s the future available to rural America if we invest in it.
