Skagit River Journal
Howard Royal and his family's Birdsview Stump Ranch	of History & Folklore This page originated in our Free Pages Covering from British Columbia to Puget Sound. Washington counties covered: Skagit, Whatcom, Island, San Juan, Snohomish. An evolving history dedicated to committing random acts of historical kindness   Please pass on this website link to your family, relatives, friends and clients.

Site founded Sept. 1, 2000. Passed 7.75 million page views, 2017; passed 800 stories in 2012 — Mailing: Noel V. Bourasaw, founder  Sedro-Woolley, Washington, 98284 where Mortimer Cook started a town & named it Bug

The photo above is from the The mother of all snows: 1916 feature. Here we look south on Metcalf Street in Sedro-Woolley sometime during the great 1916 snowstorm. Snow drifted as high as five feet in some areas. Note that the cluster lights were installed by then, the ones that inspired the present cluster lights on Woolley streets. These photos were taken by Frank LaRoche, a famed Sedro-Woolley photographer who had his office in the Schneider building at the near right. Parts of the county were cut off from the outside world for up to a month.

• Mount Vernon Log Jams Part One. Introduction to the famous Mount Vernon log jams and transcription of eye-witness articles about the work to remove them, dating from the 1870s. Includes links to the diary of Otto Klement, who arrived in the Skagit Valley in 1873.
• Mount Vernon Log Jams Part Two. Rare newspaper issues of Eldridge Morse's Northern Star (Snohomish City) that pegs exactly when work on the log jams near Mount Vernon began and when it was completed; and issues of the Washington Standard newspaper in Olympia from the 1870s that detail the work on the jams. Includes a short history of the Standard and the first newspapers in Washington Territory and Olympia, from 1853 on.
  
• Mike Aiken shares a November 1878 issues of C.B. Bagley's Puget Sound Weekly Courier, and the story of how the Upper Skagit was opened to settlement and logging that year as the log jams were conquered and our most important upriver pioneers staked their claims, including Mike's great-grandfather, Birdsey Minkler.
  

• Eldridge Morse's first tour of the Skagit river settlements from his The Northern Star newspaper in Snohomish, in the April 29, 1876 issue.
• A subsequent Eldridge Morse tour of the Skagit river settlements from his The Northern Star newspaper in Snohomish, in the April 9, 1877 issue, noting the growth of Skagit City, settlement on the north fork of the Skagit and how Mount Vernon was born that year.
  
• The way they dressed: Pioneers' clothes at the turn of the century and before
  

See the new Fishing and Hunting Portal Section with links to such stories on the site

• North Cascades Institute.
  
• How Skagit County derived its name. One version of the meaning of "Skagit"
  
• Old-Timey pioneer songs
  
• Christmas memories from Skagit County pioneers, in two parts
  
• Banking in Skagit County from frontier days through 1890s. This story will soon be changed to this address. If neither file connects, please email us.
  

• We share from the Subscribers Edition our updated, extensive list of First schools in Whatcom County (from 1854 onwards) and the area that became Skagit County from 1883 onwards. Many have shared updates and corrections. Can you help? Also see: Eloise Ingman Stendal recalls Meadow School, south of Mount Vernon.
  
• Schools in the southwest section of Skagit County and Mount Vernon from the 1880s through 1927.
  

• The first saloons in Sedro-Woolley, Skagit County and up the Skagit River. And see our new portal section about liquor, prohibition and the earliest saloons.
  
• Otto Peterson, Marblemount pioneer, tells about marketing moonshine on the Skagit river
  

• Samuel Shea was one of those pioneers who lived in several different areas of Skagit county, including Conway, Rockport and Sedro-Woolley.  Although he claimed in 1906 to have homesteaded the land that became Rockport, that is disputed in this Rockport history site.
  
• Lafayette Stevens, Sterling, Clearlake, Coal Mountain
  
• Joshua Green builds his steamboat dynasty
  
• Trip One of Green's Henry Bailey sternwheeler
  

• New portal section with eight county histories, and growing, from many writers over the past century, annotated so you can study about the incidents in detail.
  

• George Savage and the process of forming Skagit County in 1883.
  

See this Journal Timeline website of local, state, national, international events for years of the pioneer period. Did you enjoy these stories and histories? The process continues as we compile and collaborate on research about Northwest history. Can you help? Remember; we welcome correction, criticism and additions to the record. Please report any broken links or files that do not open and we will send you the correct link. With more than 800 features, we depend on your report. Thank you.

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Email us at: skagitriverjournal@gmail.com Mail copies/documents to Street address: Skagit River Journal c/o Skagit County Historical Society, PO Box 818, 501 S.4th St., La Conner, WA. 98257