Bavarian Village Theme rejuvenates Leavenworth

Iconic Communities, On the Road
on February 17, 2002

If you believe in miracles, then you might think the town of Leavenworth, Wash., (pop. 2,074) has received more than its fair share of magic dust.

In the 1960s, the community in the eastern foothills of the Cascade Mountains was living on the brink of extinction; the once-thriving hub of commerce all but dried up, its people moving away.

“The logging industry was going downhill,” says Pauline Watson, 75, a native of Leavenworth. “The mill pulled out many years before, and the railroad that originally built the town moved to Wenatchee.”

The final straw for the central Washington town was a highway-widening project that cut travel time to Wenatchee to just under a half-hour. Chain stores popped up like mushrooms, drawing folks from neighboring towns to shop.

“That was the death of the town,” Watson says. “The fruit industry was all that was up here. We had 25 empty building spaces … it was definitely dying.”

But adversity often fosters ingenuity. An idea surfaced—no one’s sure just who or where it came from—of turning Leavenworth into a Bavarian village.

The alpine influence was too strong for the people of Leavenworth to ignore, what with the town newspaper—one of the oldest in the state—called the Echo, the high school newspaper called the Yodeler, and snow-capped mountains surrounding the forested hamlet.

Enter the late Heinz Ulbricht, a designer from Bavaria who had moved to the West Coast in the 1960s and heard about the Leavenworth undertaking. Ulbricht offered to help, transforming some of the first buildings, including Alpine Electric—a business owned by Watson and her late husband, Owen—into the Bavarian motif. Shop owners nervously began to mortgage their homes and renovate storefronts into chalets with blooming window boxes.

The experiment in small-town revitalization worked. Today, more than 30 years later, the alpine village draws more than 1 million tourists a year from all over the world and has become a pillar of tourism in the Pacific Northwest.

“The big joke is mention a word to Leavenworth and they’ll make a festival out of it,” quips Watson, who co-owns the AlpenRose Inn with her sister and two of her children.

Leavenworth’s bounty of events includes Maifest, the Autumn Leaf Festival, Oktoberfest, Bavarian Fest, Christkindlmarkt, and the popular Christmas Lighting Festival. The town even put an ad in the paper looking for a town crier.

“We march to a different drummer,” Watson says.

Leavenworth is also home to the Nutcracker Museum, which houses one of the largest collections of nutcrackers in the world.

A bakery called the Gingerbread Factory, another popular tourist attraction, is a century-old house decorated to look like a gingerbread house. Its exterior is painted a warm gingerbread brown with trim made to look like icing, while candy canes stretch from the top of each porch pillar to the roofline. Inside, a hand-painted checkerboard design adorned with peppermint candies on the hardwood floor greets visitors.

The bakery is the brainchild of CarolAnn Seaman, 43, who decades ago made frequent pilgrimages to Leavenworth as a college student. Seaman started by selling her gingerbread houses on a street corner in Seattle. In 1988, she made the move to Leavenworth to open up her store. Over the years, she has expanded to include a gift shop, espresso café, and a full lunch menu. The bakery has shipped baked goods to Germany, Spain, Portugal, and Canada, but the bulk of its mail-order business comes from the East Coast. Many requests come from tourists who have visited Leavenworth on their vacations.

“One of my brothers tells me, ‘You live a vacation,’” Seaman says. “We are our own little bubble.”