A story of early Tahuya

The first settler of record in the Tahuya area was Enoch Willey, who acquired a claim in 1865. Willey sold his claim in 1875 and eventually settled at Oakland. Among the homesteaders who followed him was Rodney White, a Black man who filed a claim on 160 acres in March 1890.

White had a reputation for being a "good worker with a heart of gold," and had soon built a log house, a barn and a root cellar. He fashioned a hauling sled out of maple and used a team of oxen named Duke and Diamond, led by two burros named Baltimore and Babe, to pull it. White built the road from Tahuya to Dewatto using his ox and burro team. When he died, the burros were taken to Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle to give rides to children.

In 1912, Effie Nolan, divorced and the mother of two small children, left Chicago for Seattle, where she hoped to make a better life in less urban surroundings. Meanwhile, Fred Knowlton, who had acquired a homestead in Tahuya around 1912, advertised in the Seattle newspaper for a housekeeper. Effie applied, was hired and traveled with her children by sternwheeler to Union, then by launch to Tahuya to begin their new lives. In September 1913, Effie married Fred's son Verne and the couple lived on the ranch for the rest of their lives.

As a young girl, Effie's daughter Frances helped raise the pigs, cows and vegetables on the 160-acre farm. When she wasn't working or studying for class at the Tahuya School, she was playing with other children. One of their favorite games was a version of tag, called duck-on-the-rock. "We played it all the time. I think we placed a small rock on top of a large one, then someone threw rocks at the small rock to try to knock it off. If somebody on your team managed to knock it off, then everybody started running around like crazy and your team tried to get past the other team without being tagged. If you were caught, you had to join the other side. The game ended when the last man was tagged out on the losing team."

In 1914, residents built a 690-foot wood bridge across the Tahuya River, mainly to allow children on the far side of the river to walk to school instead of being ferried, but also so local road tax money could benefit Tahuya residents instead of going to the South Shore Road. Although the bridge was built to accommodate cars, not much motor traffic used it until the North Shore Road was opened in 1924. (In 1919, four Tahuya residents owned cars. In order to drive beyond the 3 miles of road at Tahuya, they had to barge their cars across the canal to Union.)

Frances remembered a busy life on the Knowlton farm. At first, the family mainly raised livestock, but when the land was cleared, they started growing vegetables. "We grew acres of cabbage from which we made sauerkraut that we sold to restaurants over in Seattle." In 1924, Verne and his brother Fred Jr. built a cannery on the property, including cabins for workers. A steam engine was barged from Seattle to provide power for the cannery, which "put up" vegetables from the Knowlton farm and other local growers.

The 1920s were a time of growth for Tahuya and Dewatto. Both the Woods and Brooks logging companies were going full force when Frances married John "Wing" Huson, from Seattle, in 1924. Wing had visited Tahuya often as a teenager, once even making the trip from Seattle by canoe. The couple lived in Seattle for several years, but by the early 1930s, with three children and wanting to leave the city, they returned to Tahuya. By then, the logging-off of the timberlands and the onset of the Depression had taken their toll on the area. To Frances, it seemed as if Dewatto had disappeared overnight.

The Husons bought the Tahuya Grocery, which included the local post office, from Jergen Caldevin. For a while they continued to run the post office out of the store, with Frances serving as postmistress. They eventually moved it to a small, separate building across the road as part of raising its classification from fourth class to third. Frances continued to serve as postmistress, even after she and Verne sold the store in 1952, finally retiring in 1971.

In the 1930s, Effie Knowlton was the Tahuya-area columnist for the Hood Canal Courier. In June 1932, she concluded her column by writing, "Although civilization's conventions are a direct antithesis to our primeval background, and if we do sometimes sigh when looking backward to the time before roads when we were mariners all, with only the friendly beacon light at Yachthaven to guide our course at night, we bow with what grace we can muster to the inevitable march of culture, and can become amazingly sophisticated when we think we are being observed."

■ Jan Parker is a researcher for the Mason County Historical Museum. She can be reached at [email protected]. Membership in the Mason County Historical Society is $25 per year. For a limited time, new members will receive a free copy of the book "Shelton, the First Century Plus Ten."