Part 1 of 2 parts.

In the late 1860s, the heavily forested area that would become Edmonds was home to primarily animals. There were a number of small creeks running through the dense forest, but no significant rivers that would have supported a settlement by the natives. Hunting parties and gatherers would have occasionally gone through the area looking for game, berries and other edibles.

But the early settlers who came two decades later reported an abundance of cougars, bobcats, deer and bear. The trees were so dense with towering Douglas firs, giant red cedars, smaller firs and alders and thick underbrush that sunlight seldom touched the ground. The only sounds that broke the stillness were the occasional sound of an animal, a fish splashing in a creek or a bird’s call.

It was this environment that attracted the lumberman and earliest settlers to the Edmonds area. Logger George Brackett, who is recognized as the town’s founder but not the first person to live here, purchased 147 acres of waterfront timberland in 1872. In 1876, Brackett moved his family into a cabin that he had built and started logging the land that he had purchased.

But eight years later, at the end of 1884, there were still only a few homesteads scattered around the area. There were no established roads and the only steamboat that stopped at the Edmonds “settlement” was the Buckeye, a rather small and at times unreliable form of transportation. The Buckeye oftentimes couldn’t come into Brackett’s dock or the larger dock owned by Captain Hamlin, 200 yards south of Brackett’s, due to the shallowness of the water. As a result, someone had to row out to the Buckeye and offload passengers and/or supplies if they wanted to come ashore. The situation was certainly not ideal for women who were wearing long dresses.

By January 1885, George Brackett had cleared away most of the marshy tidelands along the shoreline and had built a larger house for his family, replacing the original cabin. Despite the rustic nature of the settlement, people were beginning to arrive in the area and put down roots. There is little doubt that some of them stayed based upon a rumor that the Great Northern Railroad was going to build a railway along the eastern shore of Puget Sound, resulting in an economic boom for the Edmonds area.

The early pioneers who did stay had a difficult road ahead of them. How difficult life was, is hard to fathom. Fortunately a number of them left written and oral histories that provide us with a glimpse into life in the earliest days of Edmonds existence.

The following topical areas mirror what the early pioneers reflected upon the most when they recorded the aforementioned histories.

Author’s note: It was in the autumn of 1884 that Edmonds had its first “school.” At the end of the first school year, eight children from three families were receiving educational instruction in the back of George Brackett’s feed store. You can read more about Edmonds early schools here.

Clearing the land

When the first settlers arrived, they either had to log off the trees that were on their acreage or more often had to deal with a lot of underbrush, rocks and huge stumps left behind by logging operations. The following are a few recollections:

“When my father first cut down trees on our property, he hauled them down to the waterfront and then he went to work removing the stumps. The first stumps that were removed were where the house and other buildings were going to be. In other parts of the property he let the stumps rot so that he could burn the interiors later and then pull them out of the ground with his team of horses.” Edith Brackett Cary 

“The trees were cut down during the winter, when farm work was considerably reduced. After a tree was felled, a stump had to be removed. Grubbing the stumps started in spring as soon as the frost was off the ground. After the tree was felled, branches were cut off and the tree rolled away. A grub ax, 4 to 8 inches wide and flat on one side was used to dig around the stumps and cut off the small roots. A pick ax which had two sides was used to cut off the larger roots, loosen the soil around the stump and break up rocks. In the early days, men in the area came and helped each other cut away the roots, and remove the loose dirt until horses could pull out the stump. Everyone worked together to remove those large stumps. The branches, brush, twigs and stumps were then piled up and burned. The remaining roots in the ground were left to rot in the early days. Once rotten, the ground could be tilled and the roots were removed leaving a fertile field for planting.” Mathew Hyner

“Some of the stumps were extremely large, six feet high and eight feet in diameter.  When dynamite became available multiple charges were often used to blast the stump apart. In some situations dynamite also had to be used to blast away the larger roots that stretched as far as thirty feet away from the stump.  Once the blasting was done, the pieces were picked up and piled up to be burned.  You could hear blasts going off all day long in the early spring, and the work was extremely dangerous.  Children and women were not allowed to be  near where the blasting was being done”.  L.C. Engel 

Establishing a home

Most of the early settlers had traveled a great distance, often coming from as far away as Pennsylvania or New York. Several of them had moved to the Midwest first, typically farming, and had run into crop failures, extreme weather and financial disaster. When they arrived in Edmonds they had very little to begin with. Men generally went to work in the logging industry during the day, and came home to work the land in the evening. The wives/mothers had the primary responsibility of creating a home for the family.

In the earliest days, a small one-room cabin was often built to house the family while other parts of the land was cleared and developed.  Additional structures were then built to support the family and the homestead. Later the original cabin was added onto or a larger house was built.

“Besides the house itself we had several small houses including a milk house, a root cellar, a smoke house, an ‘out-house,’ a shed for firewood, and a small barn and pens. When a kitchen was added on to the original house there was an additional washroom and tool shed also built.” Edith Brackett Cary 

“My father bought a tract of land in 1890 and built a house on it. He had to clear away stumps to build the house, a large root cellar, out-house and a small barn for his farm animals. He was able to dig a well while he tilled around the remaining stumps, starting a small orchard and a vegetable garden. My mother, I and my 7 siblings arrived from Kansas the following year. The original house had two large rooms on the ground floor, and two large bedrooms upstairs. My father later added onto both the front and back of the house.” Carrie Jane Yost

Numerous accounts allude to the fact that the early pioneers built their home and cleared their land over multiple years. Small portions of the land were cleared and tilled, and gardens or orchards planted, which provided more food for the family. Then another portion of the land went through the same process. In some cases, it took over a decade for the early pioneers to clear away five acres of land.

Living off the land

If the early settler was going to claim land under the Homestead Act, they had to live on the land for five years. They also had to improve the land, which meant they had to plant trees to provide for the next generation of timber and/or to increase the value of the land through food production. Many of the early settlers either brought, or bought fruit trees to fulfill the Homestead Act requirement and to also feed their families.

Every family had their own garden and root cellar. People sometimes bartered but very seldom purchased any food, except the essentials from the town’s merchants.

“The first crops were planted while we were still grubbing stumps, often around stumps. We chopped up the sod and planted crops.  We were planting crops while still killing the roots because younger trees and young shoots would still come up. We worked the land and still were able to get a crop off it. It didn’t take much of a piece of ground to raise a crop. We grew huge cabbages to make sauerkraut. We grew all kinds of stuff – carrots, big son-of-a-guns, and pumpkins and squash. Every year more land was grubbed, an acre or two every year. The more you worked on the land, the more crops you’d get.” As told to Eleanor Milholland by her mother and grandmother Yost.

“Around the homes were orchards with every conceivable kind of apple, from late summer, to fall and winter. Pears, cherries, plums, prunes, berries of all kinds…gooseberry, raspberry and currants!  There were corn fields, potato patches, garden areas and later fields where wheat was grown for the cattle.

We bought very few things from the grocery store, flour, sugar, spices, coffee & tea, corn meal, plus wheat and oats for cooking.  There weren’t any dry cereals, what we had – we had to cook for a very long time.

We made our own jams and jellies, canned fruit and vegetables and other garden produce which we stored in the root cellar through the winter.  We churned our own butter, made our own cottage cheese, collected our own eggs, butchered pigs and cows for meat and had chicken whenever we wished.  We also smoked fish and salted pork.”  Edith Brackett Cary

 “When we made butter, a cow was milked the day before and then the milk was set out in a large bowl or pot for a day. When the milk separated, the cream rose to the top, where it was skimmed off and placed into the churn. An up and down action with a wooden paddle would turn the cream into butter. The separated milk that was left over was often made into cottage cheese.” Arp family memoirs

“My mother canned hundreds of jars of fruit and vegetables every year. We had canned cherries, peaches, prunes, pears, blackberries as well as tomatoes, green beans with bacon, and pickles in various shapes and sizes. The mason jars were carefully stored with their rims each year after we emptied them. Every year my brother and I would go into the woods and pick the wild blackberries, huckleberries and gooseberries that grew everywhere. The land provided a tremendous amount of food for us.” Frances Anderson

“We picked wild blackberries in the logged off lands around Edmonds, which I took home to our mother to can. I also remember the dark cold windy nights on the beach at low tide, holding the flickering lighted lantern for my mother so she could see to dig clams. It seemed a long time before her pail was full. In winter, the only good clam tides were at night.” Clara Marie Everton Strance

Weekdays – household chores

In the early days of the Edmonds School District, classes were only in session for three months each year. As a result, students were at home and helped around the house and in the yard/garden unless “shooed away” and told to “go play in the woods.” The chores were numerous and continuous. There are several recollections that alluded to the fact that “idle hands” were frowned upon.

“With a family of eight my mother was cooking all the time.  We cooked on a wood burning stove, baked our own bread, cakes and cookies.  We used heavy pots and pans for cooking. The stove had a warming oven in front and we would sit a bucket of water behind the stove to keep the water warm for cooking. We had a ‘wood’ box near the stove that we had to keep filled with wood and kindling to keep the fire going.  Three meals a day were prepared on the stove so it was in constant use.” Edith Brackett Cary

“One of my jobs as a child was to keep the wood shed filled with chopped wood and kindling for our kitchen stove. The stove was not only used for cooking, it was the main source of heat for the entire house. If I had failed to keep enough wood chopped, I would have been taken ‘out behind the wood shed.’” Paul Hyner

 “My grandmother had a spinning wheel; she carded wool to spin yarn to knit socks and mittens for family members and to occasionally trade. I was responsible for keeping the yarn from getting entangled. It wasn’t a chore that I liked much.” Jessye Engel Cogswell

“We got our light from kerosene lamps, and one of the jobs we ‘disliked’ the most was cleaning the lamps’ chimneys, caring for the wicks and replenishing the oil. The oil came in ten gallon tins, which, when emptied were used for various storage purposes.”  George Brackett Jr. 

“I helped my mother ‘bleach’ out flour sacks for kitchen dish towels, we never dreamed of paper towels. We then used what we called roller towels for our hands and face. They were long strips which fitted over rolling pins that were attached to the door usually.” Edith Brackett Cary

“We made our own soap out of “cracklins” and lye. We used the same soap for washing clothes, dishes and ourselves.”  Carrie Yost

“My father had a grinding wheel, which spun when someone pedaled it. He would sharpen all of his tools and knives on it, while us kids pedaled. It seemed like hours before he got all his axes, saws and knives sharpened.” Cris Wilsted

Saturday chores

Saturday was definitely not a day of rest. Saturday was “wash day” for most of the early pioneer families, as Sunday was “the Sabbath and the only day of rest.”  “Wash day” was not only the day for washing clothes, but also the day when family members took their weekly baths.

“We washed our clothes in wooden tubs, scrubbed them on wooden wash boards and then hung them out to dry. We felt all white clothes had to be boiled, and we had large copper containers for that purpose” Edith Brackett Cary

“One of my Saturday chores was hanging clothes out on the clothes line to dry. One of the problems I had as a child was the clothes line would swing in the wind. I had trouble attaching the clothes to the moving clothes line using the wooden clothes pins that I had to use. If I dropped the clothes, they had to be taken back to the wash tubs for another washing and scrubbing and mother was never happy about that.” Carrie Yost Astell

“Ironing was done on a home-made fashioned board covered with a thick pad of a quilted blanket with a part of a worn sheet over it.  The irons were heated on the stove and we had to pick them up with thick pads as the handles were made of metal and would have severely burnt our hands. Later this kind of iron was replaced by irons with wooden handles that could be removed while heating.” Edith Brackett Cary

 “When we took baths on Saturday night we used the same wooden or copper tubs that we used to wash our clothes.  Usually instead of the water being heated on the stove, the water was heated in the tubs while they sat next to the stove”.   Elsie Yost

In many cases, due to the fact that water was not readily available and it took a long time to heat, the same bath water was used by all the family members. You can imagine what the water may have looked like if you were a member of a large family, and the last person to take a bath. It is believed that the expression “don’t throw the baby out with the bath water” may have come from this practice. The baby possibly would have been the last one to be bathed and the water would have been dirty enough that it might have been difficult to see the baby in the murky water.

This article was researched and written by Byron Wilkes. Full credits will be given at the end of Part 2.