July, 2022
Would you believe I got tired of looking at eagles? No? Well, good, because I surely was NOT tired of looking at them. But today, for a change of pace, I headed out in search of human history in this area.
In the third photo below, you can read some history of this schoolhouse and of Camano Island. I was raised hereabouts and I didn’t know of this history.
It’s great that people have recorded this sort of information, not just here, but all over the world too. As it was, the Camano Schoolhouse history project hadn’t yet been completed when I was here on this camping trip, so I couldn’t go inside to experience that “distinctive yesteryear ambience of a 1905 classroom.” Maybe on my next visit to Camano.
However, I then drove off-island to the Stillaguamish Valley Pioneer Museum just south of Arlington, WA. This was great! It is fully open, all exhibits are open to the public. I was here for almost three hours, looking through the exhibits in at least a dozen different rooms/buildings … and looking through old records to see if I could find records of my aunt and uncle (Hallie & George) who lived in this community and ran a business here for years.
The small mountain in the background might be one of the mountains that surround Lake Cavanaugh, just to the north.
Let’s go inside this museum and see some really cool, old stuff.
The red chair in the photo above is a “horn chair”. What kind of horn? I don’t know. With everything there was to see, I didn’t even notice the horn chair when I took the photo above. Had I noticed, I would have taken a much better closeup of the chair and the sign. It was pretty cool … and kind of creepy. 🙂
The round plate on the top of this old outboard motor (above) said “Champion Motor Co.” My online research tells me this motor might be from the 1930’s or 1940’s.
Photo above … a 1938 McCormick Grain Binder.
Photo above … a 1936 Case tractor, Model L. This tractor consumed 5 gallons of gasoline every hour while pulling four 16″-wide plows. A work horse indeed.
Photo above … a 1946 John Deere tractor, two-cylinder kerosene engine, row-crop tractor. Original price would have been somewhere around $650. Maximum speed was 2,245 feet per minute or about 25 miles per hour or about 37 feet/second. Holy cow, hang onto your hat, that was fast! The total number of these tractors built by John Deere from 1939 to 1947 was slightly less than 60,000 tractors, or about 6,500 tractors every year.
The truck below surprised me when I walked around the corner and saw it. My uncle George and my aunt Hallie (mentioned above) owned and ran the Brooks Hardware store in Arlington, WA, for many years. The truck below was before their time, but what a cool connection for me.
This Arlington Hardware & Lumber pickup truck (a Ford truck) is probably from the late 1930’s or early 1940’s. I haven’t taken the time to get a specific year. Boy, I’d love to drive THAT around town. 🙂
And then I came to a room that was full, and I mean FULL, of documents, books of documents, shelves of documents and books, and bookshelves full of shelves of books and documents … all historical documentation of the area around Arlington and Silvana, but also the millions of acres of farm land on the mainland just east of Camano Island.
I tried to find documents about my aunt and uncle, to find when they arrived in the area, when they purchased the hardware store, when they bought their farm, etc. Maybe there were photos or signed documents. But I gave up after an hour or so, when I realized I had waded through less than 3% of the documents in that room. It would have taken days to search all of it.
BUT … I did find an entire two shelves of yearbooks from Arlington High School. I just happened to pull out two of the years that my cousin Ned (George & Hallie’s son) was in school there. He’s the handsome one … second from the left. I think this was his Junior year.
And here is his Senior year photo below. He had changed from a kid into a young man. But I also noticed that the guy next to him (probably alphabetically by last name) did too. What fun. I’ve lost touch with Ned. Guess I better do some online research, eh?
So that was my day today … local schoolhouse on Camano … and then the Stillaguamish Valley Pioneer Museum (named after the local Stillaguamish River … or “the Stilly” as the locals call it).
This was a great day. Fun stuff. Isn’t that “horn chair” weird? Would you sit in that?