Tickets are now available for purchase at Kusler’s Pharmacy and Gifts, Annie’s on First, McDaniel’s Do-it Center, Speckeled Hen and Joyworks. Tickets on the day of the tour will be available at the Waltz Building at 116 avenue B. For further infomation please call 360-568-5235 or e-mail  snohomishhistoricalsociety@gmail.com.

Ed Anderson, left, with David Dilgard

As Ed tells the story, it was a rainy evening, when he received five dirty dusty cardboard boxes, from his mother. She had been storing them in the crawl space of the family home — an inheritance from her Mother’s sister — the family pack-rat.

That was nearly ten years ago. It has taken Ed this long to sort through all 5 boxes with the discipline of his training as a civil engineer, currently employed with Boeing.

Walter P. Bell, c.1888

He began practicing law in Port Townsend, was engaged in the mail service on the steamships, and finally opening a law office on the second floor of Wilbur’s Drug Store on First Street, downtown Snohomish. Attorney Bell was instrumental in forming the articles of city’s first incorporation in 1888, and was elected to serve as the city’s first attorney.

It was around this time that Walter met and eventually married Lillian Blackman who had followed her father Almon to Snohomish from Maine. They were cousins to the well known Blackman Brothers who settle here in 1872.

The couple gave birth to four children, Harold, Mary, Doris and Winifred. Mary was Ed’s grandmother and Doris is the heroine of this story for saving everything — papers, letters, photographs, even diaries kept by her great grandmother back in Maine who never made the journey west, yet recorded the ups and downs of the clan so far away.

Doris with her father Walter, 1923

Included in this generous and significant donation is a statement from the Claim Department of the Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company, dated July 9, 1934, notifying Mrs. Lillian Bell of a $2,000 payment upon the death of her husband, (in the same year).

All materials donated to the Historical Society are processed under the supervision of Kathleen Lince, the Society’s paid archivist. Your membership makes this vital community service available — please consider joining today.

This meeting is for You!  Please join fellow Snohomish Historical Society members for a presentation on the historic Carnegie Library project.  Come hear about the current plans and future use of Snohomish’s own gem presented by Melody Clemons, president of the Snohomish Carnegie Education Center.  You won’t want to miss this one!

Refreshments will be served.

Dear Once and Future Members:

ONE SUNDAY AFTERNOON, Alberta and Richard (pictured above) visited the Blackman House Museum carrying a large box. Inside was a well-used Victorian album, covered in faded rose velvet, with thick pages trimmed in gold. “It was my grandmother’s album,” explained Richard Guttormsen. She was Edith Blackman, daughter of Elhanan and Francis, born in 1872, the same year that the Blackman brothers left Maine for the Pacific Northwest.

The E. Blackman Album is now under the care of Kathleen Lince, the Society’s first paid archivist who has been creating accession records of our papers and memorabilia since the spring of 2008 with a generous grant from the Stack Family Foundation.

The album will be on display at our Annual Meeting on Monday evening, November 16, at the Waltz Building, 116 Avenue B. A business meeting begins at 7pm with the election of Directors and Officers and other business, which will adjourn to enjoy the Director’s (Home Made) Desert Buffet at 8pm, along with a champagne toast to the 150th Anniversary of the City’s founding.

The Founders Award for Historic Preservation, 2009 will be presented to Zouhair Mardini and Mosaic Architecture for their outstanding collaboration on the 901 First Street Building project. Joshua Scott and members of the Mosaic team will give a show and tell presentation of the two-year long project.

And my two-year term as President ends with 2009, so this letter is the last opportunity I will have to gently remind you how important your financial support is to the survival of the Society’s mission. The dues have not been raised for 2010; instead, I am asking you to consider raising your level of commitment to the Society by renewing at the Sustaining Member, or even the Archivist level of membership of $150, for which I will gratefully sign and deliver a copy of my book “Early Snohomish.”

I couldn’t help wonder while turning the thick pages of the recently acquired Blackman Album — what would have happened to this priceless treasure of local history if our Society and its archives did not exist?

And the same question can be asked of our entire collection that began 40 years ago – from one of the smallest artifacts: Mrs. E. C. Ferguson’s calling card that she left while visiting the Blackmans – to the largest: the historic home itself!

Your continuing commitment is our main source of revenue; without it, the Society will fade away, and future donors will have only the likes of eBay … or the dumpster!

Please join us for the Annual Meeting on November 16th at 7p.

Warner Blake
(You may download a Membership Form HERE.)

The event was held in conjunction with an exhibition titled, “E. C. Ferguson in Steilacoom, 1858-59,” which is on view during Museum hours, weekends from 1 to 4pm.

Joining Joan was David Dilgard, well known to Society members as the History Specialist in the Northwest Room of the Everett Public Library who has adopted the history of Snohomish to the benefit of us all.

Moderating the discussion was Warner Blake who first introduced David as one who introduced him to the history of Snohomish. “And David’s accounts always began with Steilacoom,” Warner said, “so finally, early this year I visited the Steilacoom Historical Society and was lucky enough to show up on a day when Joan was at work in the archives.”

Immediately, she found a reference in the history of Pierce County referring to E. C. Ferguson and some 95 other bachelors calling for a meeting to ” devise ways to secure the emigration of the fair sex from the Atlantic States to our shores.” At the discussion on Sunday, Joan reported that no other account of the meeting has been found, and David felt it was most likely a fraternal activity without serious intentions of taking further steps. In fact, the meeting was called for a day in February 1860, three months before Ferguson took up residence on the Snohomish River.

Four years later, Asa Mercer acted on the idea when he brought 11 women to Seattle from the east coast who became known as the Mercer Girls.

The account that Ferguson had a child with a native woman in Snohomish before his marriage in 1868 to Lucetta Morgan was brought up. David reminded us that it was common for the white settlers of Snohomish to take an Indian wife and that in fact, the first school in 1865 was attended by the children of these mixed marriages. Joan reported that this was not common in the early years of Steilacoom, perhaps due to the transit nature of Steilacoom’s population — most were on their way to somewhere else — as was the case with our Mr. Ferguson.

Following the discussion, guests visited the exhibition in the Gallery of the Blackman House that features images and text of life in Steilacoom when Ferguson lived there, along with portraits of his business partners in the plan to establish a ferry across the Snohomish River for the military road proposed to connect Steilacoom with Bellingham.

Only Ferguson took up residence here when financing for the road fell through. David reminded us that it’s very unusual for a founding settler to actually settle-in as Ferguson did in the town that he named after the river and where he lived until his death in 1911.

Follow this link to view a slide show of the event.

Follow this link to read more about E. C. Ferguson.

Follow this link to read more about Pierce County.

Bill was born in the family home on Avenue H in 1921, and where he was living with his daughter Bonnie when he died in the hospital on July 8th. He had been in and out of the hospital for the past couple of years, so it was always a treat when I would run into him shopping at Top Foods. He would apologize that he wasn’t quite ready yet to take the tour of First Street that he promised for an oral history project that I was hoping to do with him. That’s how I met Bill, as the to-go-guy with a question of what business preceded the current one in such and such building on First.

Once, I found Bill in the flower section at the store and asked him what he was up to. It was Memorial Day weekend and he was picking out flowers for his wife’s grave, “I don’t want Georgia upset with me,” he said. No chance of the now.

You may read more about Bill’s life HERE.

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Bill would have enjoyed the exhibition now on view in our Waltz Building, titled, “Treasurers from the Attic.” Charter member, Middy Ruthruff led a committee responsible for selecting, installing and now attending the extensive exhibition of a wide variety of objects and memorabilia. And it’s FREE! Open from 11 to 3p. everyday until July 25th.

Read the article in the Herald HERE.

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Finally, a heads-up that my monthly column in the Tribune, “Snohomish: Then and Now” is also available on it’s own website: Snohomish Then And Now — and it has just been updated with a story about Bickford Motors, a generous supporter of the Society.

CLICK ON THE ARROW to begin a 11 minute documentary about the letter Snohomish resident, Jeff Starr, left behind on his computer, which was intended for his girl friend if he should not return from his third deployment to Iraq.

“LetterHome” is the title Jeff used for the message found on his laptop computer several months after he was killed in action on May 30, 2005, while on patrol in Ramadi, Iraq. The short documentary tells the story of a love letter that evolved into a political football on the internet and eventually referenced in a speech by President Bush.

Over eight hours of interview footage captured in 2007 will be archived with the Snohomish Historical Society. The expenses for the project were donated by the production company PSTOO. Sharon Howard of Howard and Rosen Productions interviewed the Starr family members.

The movie will be screened on Sunday, May 31, 2009, 2p, at the Snohomish Library as part of a program hosted by Gold Star Parents.

Please follow this link for more details.

Eleanor Leight taking care of details at Emerson School as the days countdown to opening night of the 31st Annual Variety Show on Thursday, May 7th. Tickets may be hard to come by, so you may need to sign up as an usher and see the show for free! We still need volunteers for the Saturday and Sunday evening performances. Please call Gary Ferguson, 360.568.4746, for details and to sign-up.

Follow this link to purchase a DVD documenting the show.

Writer, naturalist and teacher Frances Wood spoke on Sunday, February 15, about her book “Down to Camp: A History of Summer Folk on Whidbey Island”. Frances is related to the Blackmans who lived in our historic home. Her great-grandmother was Nina Blackman, a cousin to Hycranus Blackman who hired her to teach school in Snohomish when he was serving on the school board in the 1880s. It was during this time that several families, including the Blackmans, began spending the month of August camping on a Whidbey Island beach — reached by boat going down river. This tradition continues to this day and France’s account of this unique summer culture through the years is informative and quite endearing.
Following a short Q & A, Frances read parts of the first chapter from her new book, which is a fictional account of Nina’s journey to the frontier town of Snohomish to teach school and her courtship with Charles Bakeman. It was a real treat and enjoyed by all .