Westville

Westville, on State Highway 94 four miles west of Groveton in central Trinity County, grew up around a sawmill established by Peter Josserand, Jr., and James Marion West in 1898. In 1901 West bought out Josserand and named the company the West Lumber Company. The site had been known as Walton and had a mill ten years earlier. A post office was established in 1900, and by 1914 the community had a population of 100. The community began to decline just after World War I when most of the timber in the area had been cut. In 1921 the sawmill was closed and the plant dismantled; many of the residents moved on to other sawmill towns in the region or to lumbering areas of the West Coast. In 1929 the post office closed, and by the mid-1930s only two businesses remained. In the early 1990s Westville was a dispersed community. The population was forty-six in 2000.