McKenna, WA

McKenna is an unincorporated Pierce County census-designated place on State Route 507 and the Nisqually River, east of Yelm. The 2020 census counted 678 residents. It began around 1908 as a timber company town, so the river valley and the old road do more to shape the place than any municipal boundary. When the timber supply thinned and the lumber market sagged, the mill was dismantled and even the land office moved away. That left McKenna with a small-community feel rooted in a former company layout but open to the larger South Sound landscape.

State Route 507 runs past the Nisqually corridor toward Yelm and the surrounding foothills, while the river keeps the place connected to the older timber geography. Pierce County's broader story includes Indigenous communities along rivers and prairies, the Hudson's Bay Company's Fort Nisqually, and the later timber industry, all of which sit behind this little roadside settlement. McKenna's local scoop is a Washington community that started as a lumber camp, lost its mill, and still sits where a highway meets the Nisqually.