History at a Glance

In October 1870, Eva Kiddell was three months short of being 5 years old, living with her grandmother in Chicago, when her family decided she should be the one to accompany her Aunt Sara Shepherd to the "wilderness of Mason County," where Sara was to become the bride of Captain Ed Miller. The two made the long journey by train to San Francisco, then by boat to Victoria, and on to Hammersley Inlet. In 1950, Eva wrote some of her memories for the Daughters of the Pioneers of Washington (which she mentioned she was not eligible to join, being a pioneer rather than a pioneer's daughter). This story is from Eva's memoir: "I can't remember anything about San Francisco, but I do remember the boat trip from there to Victoria. The boat was old - her name was The Pelican and I believe she made just one more trip. The vegetables were kept in a lifeboat on the deck.

"Uncle (Captain Miller) met us in Victoria, and the wedding was held there on November 11. All I recall of it is the newlyweds sitting on a lounge together while I played marbles with a little boy on the floor. We must have come by boat to Seattle. Uncle had left his boat in Olympia and in it we made the last lap of our journey to the ranch, where the black dog Fanny barked a welcome on the landing (Captain Miller's 160 acres was on the Agate side of Hammersley Inlet). Uncle had built a new house of lumber for his bride, which boasted a living room, kitchen, pantry, bedroom, and unfinished upstairs.

"Aunt Sara, the black dog, and I held down the home place while Uncle made his business trips. (Captain Miller visited logging camps and sawmills up and down the Sound, where he sold apples and hay from the ranch and hauled saleable produce for other ranchers.) Uncle's boat was named "The Wanderer," but he called her "The Plunger." Since there were practically no roads, all the "going" we did, which was little, we did in row boats or The Plunger.

"It was on my uncle's ranch that I grew up. A lonely life for a little girl? Yes, but I knew no other. As a 5 and 6 year old, I made companions for myself. The kitchen walls were painted, but the knots showed through. Each knot was a little girl. I named them. And as I sat quietly on a chair, the girls - Kate, Candle and the rest - would join me in absorbing play.

"I didn't go to school until I was 9, when I stayed two months with Mrs. Enoch Willey at Oakland, where she was caring for her own brood and the motherless Fredson children. I was 11 when we finally got a school at home. There were Chapman and Miller children also attending. The first year we had three months of school and three teachers. The first teacher, from Port Madison, was with us three weeks, then got homesick - maybe lovesick, too, for she went home and got married. The next one, from Steilacoom, stuck it out for six weeks before the isolation became too much for her. She quit. A Mrs. Williams came to the rescue and taught the last three weeks. From then on we had school every year, for from three to four months.

"One day when I was 14, I was helping Uncle make cider. Cider and vinegar were by-products of the apple orchard. As I fed apples into the cider press, a rowboat was pulled up on the beach and a tall young man of 20 landed. He had come to buy vinegar. His name was Charles Wivell.

"The Wivell family, consisting of father, mother, Charles and his sister, Louise, had come from Kansas a year earlier and were living on the Walters place while the Walters were visiting in the east. The Wivells were not completely sold on the Pacific NW and in October they went east to Missouri. Charles was back the following May. He had had time to compare the $16 per month he earned in Missouri with the $55 per month he'd made in Washington.

"One after another the rest of the family drifted back. For a time, Mr. Wivell Sr. worked for W.H. Kneeland at his sawmill in Shelton Valley. The lumber from the mill was flumed down to Shelton. Mr. Wivell built a house with some of this lumber on the present site of Kneeland Park.

"Charles Wivell never cared for logging camps. He worked for settlers, Captain Miller, Thomas Webb, then he took a homestead for himself. His father acquired the adjoining land. These two farms formed the basis of the Wivell Dairy holdings in Isabella Valley. Charles held his land but worked out for two or three years, before he decided to settle down. So he built himself a house and asked me to come and share it with him. The house to which I came as a bride in May 1888, still stands. We built the big house later, for as the years passed there came to be 11 of us. Nine children, and still I survived and kept my health. I often thought back to my childhood when the pioneer tragedy of the first Mrs. Fredson's death left five motherless children. It was borne in my childish mind that this was the pattern of life - if you had five children, then you died. That my eight living children are all near me and within call is a comfort and a blessing.

"Eva added that the two great griefs in her life were the death of her son Fred, who died of influenza in France in 1919 while serving with the U.S. Army, and the death of her husband Charles when the big house burned in 1942. (Eva, who sleeping on the main floor, was awakened by a barking dog and managed to escape.)"

Eva Wivell died April 6, 1951.

■ 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."