Thanks to the many devoted history fans of Snohomish who braved a major deluge on Sunday, September 16th, to visit the seven homes of our historical society’s annual tour. The downpour added the extra benefit of getting out of the rain to the expected reward of seeing the interiors of a wide variety of homes, including the “Stevens House” at 330 Avenue B, the subject of this month’s column. With the homeowner’s assistance, we hit a home run with the discovery of a historic image of Snohomish hiding undercover, yet in plain sight.
The story begins when the homeowner, Christine Wakefield-Nichols, invited me over to see a historical photo of their house that they had inherited from the previous owner. The word is that this house was built in 1897 by the city of Everett and the Great Northern Railroad to house their “locating” engineer John F. Stevens. The historic photo had a white border of the mat board framing the view in our first historic image. Obviously, the unknown photographer was capturing the finely dressed kids posing at the base of the stump and the Stevens House was caught in the background. The children are not identified.
With Christine’s blessing, I removed the print from the frame in order to properly scan the image for our digital collection at the historical society and to distribute it to the press for publicity of the coming home tour. Imagine my eyes opening wide as I carefully separated the print from the mat board, turned it over, and saw the expanded view pictured in our second image. This is the earliest image I’ve seen of what we might call “upper Snohomish” – north of 4th Street, looking west -- which, as you can see in the foreground, is still just a path. It appears that the house on the far right does not exist, although the structures currently standing on the west side of Avenue B are very similar. The large house in the center distance, however, may be the existing structure at 402 Avenue E – readers’ opinions are welcomed.
No word has been found yet of how long Stevens lived in the graceful structure, but we do know that he was working on the Panama Canal Project in 1905. As reported in the extensive coverage of our annual home tour by this paper, Stevens located the pass now named in his honor over the Cascade Range.
Coincidentally, it was around 1905 that Noble Harvey began stocking blasting powder specifically for removing the stumps of the fallen giants, such as those populating the center of our historic image -- as if on a tour of the homes they just helped create.
A short update about the book Early Snohomish. Signed copies are available at the Blackman House Museum gift shop, 116 Avenue B, open Saturdays and Sundays from 11 to 3 pm. The good news is that Arcadia Publishing is doing a second printing, but the bad news is that they could not fill Kusler’s order for our book signing event on October 26th! But the wonderful people at Kusler’s are making delicious lemonade out of the situation by selling the historical society’s copies and donating 100 percent of the proceeds to the organization.
Published in the Snohomish County Tribune, October 24, 2007.