milwaukee land company

[ArtB]

There is a lot of WA state land that used to be Milwaukee land company that is now state forest land.

Sometime during the Milwaukee bankruptcies I lost track of how various portion changed hands - I kow one big set of parcels was sold, did the state take other sections for back taxes or ??? Back in the mid late 90s.

Just curious to fill in knowledge gaps, thought one of the WA state guys would know some details, could not find anything on the web about how the state came to own some of the sections.

 

[northmanlogging]

Most counties around here keep records as to who owned what dating back to the 1970's on average.

If you know of a certain parcel it might be possible to look up the local county and find the parcel number then do a owner history? Generally if it goes back to the state all that info is flushed, since it is no longer considered "county" land.

There are huge swaths in Snohomish county that just bring up blank pages, most of them are DNR or FS, the rest generally are going to be Navy owned etc

Also for current status an app fer da smarty phones OnX works pretty good, gets phone numbers and mailing addresses for obscure areas... does cost a bit though.

 

[madhatte]

Most -- likely all -- counties in WA have a cadastral GIS tool that will graphically show you current and past ownerships of any parcel you are interested in. I suspect other states have the same but can only speak for WA. I use the cadastral tools fairly often because they are useful for estimating stand ages, since back in the day, big ownerships commonly either bought or sold land immediately following a timber sale. Stumpage isn't as big a driver as it used to be because REITS turn it over to suburbs now and NGO's lock it up as preserves, but it used to be that a clearcut was an opportunity to either invest in future timber or pass that investment on.