A watchful Sam Wold guards his domain from a stool behind the counter. Anyone who enters is hit with a blaring buzz that sounds like a burglar alarm. It's quiet again when the door shuts.

Inside, stuffed bobcats and old photographs surround a seemingly endless supply of hand saws, chain saws, chains, suspenders and almost anything a logger would need to do the job.

Wold, 80, has owned the Sultan Saw Shop and lived in a trailer next to it for almost half a century. He has seen the decades go by, from a time when loggers were kings to today, when they have all but disappeared.

A smiling Wold is one of four old-timers whose portraits can be found on T-shirts being sold by the Sultan Centennial Committee. The committee has been raising money for Sultan's 100th-birthday bash, which will culminate June 25, when the city will gather for an old-fashioned loggers' picnic.

MIKE SIEGEL / THE SEATTLE TIMES Sultan today. The city has events planned over the next two months to celebrate its 100th anniversary.

Festivities began in January with "The Vanishing Loggers," an art exhibit at the Sultan Community Center on Main Street. Other events commemorating the occasion in the next few months include a musical-theater performance, portraying some of the area's first settlers, and a beard-growing contest.

The celebrations look back at Sultan's first century and are intended to educate community members about what came before them, says Sandy Delvecchio, the chairwoman of the committee and president of the Sky Valley Historical Society.

A lot of people have lived in Sultan for multiple generations, Mayor Ben Tolson says. "I've heard from longtime residents that I've gotten to know that it's a community of hard-working people and it's just been a great place to raise families."

But the city is at a crossroads.

"The Sultan that we are in right now is a Sultan that is in a time of transition," Tolson says. "I just see this community on the brink of exploding population-wise, yet there's a strong desire to maintain that intimacy that they've had down through the years."

Sultan today

Wold says the biggest change he's seen over the years is "probably the local economy."

"People had jobs around here," says Wold. "You used to work close to home, and you didn't have to drive 50, 60, 100 miles."

Wold, a logger for 58 years, has lived on the same land on Highway 2 since 1958.

He had been working in Skagit County as a contractor, falling and bucking trees, and came to Sultan to get a second job — he opened the saw shop. His wife, Marie, ran the shop while he worked in the woods.

Wold became a logger when he graduated from high school in 1941.

"It was the best job you could get getting out of high school," he says. "It paid the most — it paid for the danger."

The salary was $1 an hour.

But, Wold says, "there's practically no logging anymore." He cites a list of reasons, touching on everything from conservation efforts to government interference.

Frustrated by the changes, a wistful but angry Wold continues: "It's all park now from here clear over the mountains to Leavenworth. North and south of the road, there's nobody doing anything."

MIKE SIEGEL / THE SEATTLE TIMES Sam Wold has owned the Sultan Saw Shop on Highway 2 for almost 50 years. Wold, who became a logger in 1941, has served the industry for decades but says "there's practically no logging anymore."

A glimpse of the past

The words "Sultan Saw Shop" in yellow block letters are emblazoned vertically on his black suspenders. Wold wears a black Stihl baseball cap, the name of a chain-saw company whose products dominate the shop.

When the phone rings, he answers it with a bark: "Sultan Saw Shop, Sam talkin'."

A World War II veteran with two Purple Hearts, Wold is also a proud member of the Tulalip Tribes, he says.

Wold has photographs of the way it used to be. One image shows a group of about 100 people watching a dozen men at a bucking contest — cutting felled trees into logs — in Sultan in the late 1930s. Another shows a parade of one-log trucks in nearby Snohomish. The huge "sticks," as they were called, measured about 10 feet in diameter.

Wold gives copies of the old pictures to a customer, even if he spends only $1.50 on a section of tubing for his chain saw.

After Wold helps the customer, he returns to chatting with his old buddy Bob Lawson, a retired logger who has lived in Sky Valley since he was born in 1929.

A young logger comes in to buy some measuring tape. "Bye Sam," he says, as he saunters out of the shop.

"When Bob and I used to work together, at this time today [about 10 a.m.], we was already working on the job," Wold said. "Not like these guys — they work anytime they want."

Delvecchio remembers a time when Wold's shop would be open by 5 a.m.

Deep roots

Delvecchio, 59, a lifelong resident of Sultan, comes from one of the city's pioneering families.

"My family has been here since the 1800s," she says. "My grandchildren are the sixth generation to go to the Sultan School District."

MIKE SIEGEL / THE SEATTLE TIMES Sandy Delvecchio stands in front of the house in Sultan that her great-grandparents built in the early 1900s.

White settlers arrived in the northern Sky River Valley in the 1870s, though Native Americans were the first to inhabit the area. In the late 1800s, Chinese people came to mine gold along the rivers. About 15 Native American families lived in the area at that time. They were led by a man named Tseulto, whom white settlers called Sultan John, and many believe the city was named after him.

Sultan was incorporated June 28, 1905 — its population, 400. For decades, mining, farming and logging would sustain Sultan's residents.

Delvecchio's Great-Grandpa and Great-Grandma Rosborough came from back east looking for new land and opportunities, says Delvecchio. They had a homestead on the west side of the Sultan River. The kids had to walk across a swinging bridge to get to school, she says. Eventually, they built a house in town and just left the homestead.

The house still sits at Date and Second streets.

Sweet memories of Sultan swirl in Delvecchio's mind. "We had a grocery store on Main Street and a meat market, a doctor, a pharmacist, of course, the post office and a bank. See, we had more businesses in town than we do today.

"You could ride your horse to the tavern and go in and have a drink. It was small-town America. It was won-der-ful."

An uncertain future

Residents see the changes ahead, and they're concerned about Sultan's future. They're not only worried about its lack of an economic base — they wonder about the burgeoning population and how the city will sustain itself as the demand for services increases.

Pretty soon, the Sultan Saw Shop will be gone.

"It's closing down," Delvecchio says. "Yeah, they're going to widen the intersection and put a stoplight there. He sold the land ... and he's taking all his stuff with him."

Sipping coffee at the Dutch Cup Restaurant, the main restaurant in Sultan, Delvecchio isn't certain what the future will bring.

Sandy Delvecchio, a lifelong resident of Sultan, is shown above in her 1964 high-school graduation photo.

"That road that's going up the hill, they're building more houses up there," she says. "We are growing. It's terrible."

Delvecchio, whose father, grandfather and brother were loggers, is clenching onto her roots.

"There were 600 logging families in Sultan, and now there's five, and that's why we started the centennial off with the vanishing logger," she said. "I guess that's why the centennial is important to me, because we are losing all this. I mean ... the only development that's going in is housing.

"We're growing by leaps and bounds, but we don't have a driving industry," Delvecchio adds. "We don't have anything that people can do to earn a living here."

The next century

Like Delvecchio, Mayor Tolson believes Sultan's future will look very different from its past.

"It used to be an isolated community of farmers and loggers with a very quaint, small-town feel," says Tolson, who became mayor last year. "I personally never knew that Sultan. ... I'm kind of a newcomer to the community."

Tolson moved to town from Chehalis with his wife and three children nine years ago to become the pastor of the Sultan Assembly of God.

Although he knows there's a fear that the family-friendly atmosphere will be lost, Tolson looks forward to the growth, which he believes will soon provide a large-enough base of consumers with which to lure new commercial developers to Sultan.

A boomtown during the mining and logging years, Sultan's economy has experienced a depression in the past few decades. It has become a community that, for the most part, does not offer its residents jobs, nor its city a healthy sales-tax base.

MIKE SIEGEL / THE SEATTLE TIMES This carving is one of several pieces of chain-saw art at Sam Wold's Sultan Saw Shop.

Many of the storefronts on Main Street are empty. On a given weekday, few people can be seen walking along Sultan's thoroughfare, and there is always a space to park a car.

"We're seeing sales dollars flow to Monroe every day," Tolson says.

The commuter reality has left Sultan empty. Because of the lack of opportunities in town, less than 5 percent of those who live in the city work in Sultan, Tolson says. "We have Boeing families here. We have Microsoft families here. If you want a back route into the Seattle/King County area, ask a person from Sultan."

But unlike neighboring Gold Bar, which may have to dissolve its status as a city because of financial woes, Tolson says Sultan is in a good position despite its difficulties of recent years.

By the end of 2003, the city had run a deficit of $800,000 in a span of four years.

"We were on the verge of collapse, financially," Tolson says.

But the city has done a number of things to help itself. Last year, officials instituted a spending freeze. The city established a grant department to bring in outside funding.

And when the Sultan's population reaches 5,000, "we'll move onto the playing field with everybody else," Tolson says. Often, commercial developers consider investing in cities only if they have at least 5,000 residents.

Sultan's population is 4,135. There are 120 homes slated to be built this summer and about 600 more in the next four or five years, according to Tolson.

"We're aggressively looking for commercial businesses," he says. "We're looking for livable-wage jobs for people in the community and to keep people from commuting."

In the next decade, a legion of newcomers is expected to move to Sultan. Whether they are commuters or not, it will be a challenge for the community to remain one where neighbors greet neighbors by name.

Judy Chia Hui Hsu: 425-745-7809 or jhsu@seattletimes.com