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Vol. 96, No. 45

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SEE OPTIONS, 2

Elementary review is not popularity contest,

school official saysBY ALLISON ESPIRITU

Staff Reporter

Snoqualmie Valley School District officials weighing more than 1,300 comments and responses in this spring’s elementary school bound-ary review process caution residents that the change is not a popularity contest.

Concerned parents flood-ed two public comment meetings held Monday and Tuesday, March 29 and 30, at North Bend Elementary and Snoqualmie Middle School, but none took the microphone. Rather, school officials asked parents to write their comments on cards, which were then read to the district’s boundary review committee, made up of school staff.

Jeff Hogan, committee facilitator and district direc-tor of instructional technology, noticed a phenomenon at the second meeting that was dif-ferent from the first.

“What was heard on Tuesday night was unique,” Hogan told the Record.

Monday’s meeting saw more support for options A and C, while Tuesday’s meeting saw increased sup-port for option F.

Parents campaign for school boundary options

History museum explores vanished community

BY SETH TRUSCOTTEditor

The forested pathways surround-ing the site of Weyerhaeuser’s desert-ed Snoqualmie Falls lumber mill hide secrets. But some people know how to uncover them.

Dave Battey, a retired telephone com-pany employee and history sleuth for the Snoqualmie Valley Historical Museum, is one such man. On a cold March morn-ing, Battey hopped a guard rail near his home and hiked down an elk trail just off 396th Drive. His destination: the ghostly remains of the Snoqualmie Valley’s origi-nal YMCA.

The elk trail is more than it seems. Under layers of leaf litter, Battey’s boots find the old loop road, once a main thoroughfare in the now-vanished

community of Snoqualmie Falls.“It’s all asphalt,” said Battey. Steps away,

seemingly lost in the forest, is a paved school yard, hidden under the leaves.

Here, the forest is reclaiming its own. Weyerhaeuser moved houses, bulldozed pavement and replanted the town with firs 40 years ago. English ivy, escaped from some mill worker’s garden, entwines the trunks near the vanished community center.

In its heydey, the Snoqualmie Falls community hall drew children and adults from as far as Carnation.

“It was quite spectacular, probably the biggest Y this side of Seattle,” Battey said.

Today, just finding where it stood is a challenge. Battey’s only clue to the Y’s whereabouts is a steel pipe among the trunks. Holding up an old photo, Battey zeroes in on a tiny signpost in the photo that directed firefighters to a water source.

“The community hall was really right

here,” he said. The pipe is the only visible vestige to a building that nurtured thou-sands of lives.

Quick growthThe company town of Snoqualmie

Falls sprang up fast — and vanished almost as quickly. Snoqualmie Falls had its genesis in the creation of the Snoqualmie Falls Lumber Company in 1914 by Weyerhaeuser and the Grandin-Coast Lumber Company. Homes and services were needed for the mill workers, and the town coalesced as the lumber company began operations in 1917.

Bunkhouses provided initial homes for the loggers and mill workers. Over a period of about four years, true neighborhoods developed — places called The Flats, The Gulch, Riverside and the Dirty Dozen, so-called for its

Ghosts of the mill town

Seth Truscott/Staff Photo

Chasing the ghosts of a vanished community, Snoqualmie Valley Historical Museum member Dave Battey uncovers the play-ground foundations of long-lost Snoqualmie Falls Grade School. The lost town is the focus of a new museum exhibit.

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GHOSTS FROM PAGE 1

Tribe found Nelems site too dilapidated to save

BY SETH TRUSCOTTEditor

The former Nelems Memorial Hospital in Snoqualmie has been demol-ished to make way for Snoqualmie Tribe elder hous-ing.

Tribal Administrator Matt Mattson said the 1947 struc-ture offered too many chal-lenges for a successful renova-tion.

Contractor Bubba’s Trucking of Carnation will clear the site, located east of Snoqualmie Casino on Southeast North Bend Way, within a week.

“It was far more expensive to try to remodel it than to tear it down and rebuild new,” Mattson said.

The tribe’s $1.4 million proj-ect would build four housing units for seniors. Construction begins this summer.

Preference will be given to low-income elders. To reside there, elders should apply to the tribe’s Housing Committee.

The tribe purchased the Nelems site in 2005.

“By the time we took own-ership, you could barely tell it was an old hospital, except for the morgue in the basement,” Mattson said.

When the tribe originally purchased the building, it was thought that some parts of the building, such as the founda-tion, could be saved. But that strategy was discarded.

The building was not in good shape, Mattson said.

“I don’t think it was func-tional for any use whatsoever,” he said.

The tribe had to remove asbestos from the building last year.

Bubba’s Trucking owner Chuck Hinzman said that some parts of the building were sound and sturdy, but the side walls were rotten.

“I can’t pull the stucco off the side walls,” he said. “I’m afraid the building will col-lapse.”

Demolition crews found the hospital’s old morque under the floor. They’ll have to jack-hammer its five-foot-thick concrete walls to bits.

Much of the materials, including wood beams, brick and plaster, will be recycled or reused, Hinzman said.

Building historyNelems was a precursor to

Snoqualmie Valley Hospital, which opened in 1983.

Superintendent Bernice Nelems built the 12,000 square foot hospital in 1948 for $32,000, according to a Jan. 1, 1948, Valley Record article. The building replaced Snoqualmie Falls Hospital at the Weyerhaeuser mill.

The building was named Nelems Hospital as a memo-rial to Nelems’ mother, father and sister. The Nelems family operated it until 1969 when it was sold to a group of physi-cians and re-named Nelems Memorial Hospital.

The hospital was where a generation of Snoqualmie Valley residents were treated, and where a generation of Valley babies were born.

When it opened, the build-ing had 23 rooms — five fewer than today’s hospital — as well as a solarium, living room, sur-gery, kitchen, and quarters for staff in the basement.

“For 1948, this was a small but modern hospital,” said Snoqualmie Valley Historical Museum member Gloria McNeely.

Six of her grandchildren were born there, and McNeely’s son Denny was treated for a compound leg fracture dur-ing the last football game of his senior high school career.

She recalled the care there as exemplary.

While noting that the building was never a candi-date for historic registry list-ing, McNeely expressed some regret that the building could not find a continuing role in the elder housing plans.

The Snoqualmie Tribe has also executed a purchase agreement for the current Snoqualmie Valley Hospital, located on Ethan Wade Way in Snoqualmie. The tribe is nego-tiating an extension on its pay-ment schedule to King County Hospital District 4, asking for a minimum monthly payment plan. The tribe plans to turn Snoqualmie Valley Hospital into a tribal health center.

Wrecking ball hits former hospital

Seth Truscott/Staff Photo

Chuck Hinzman sweeps up debris at the former Nelems Memorial Hospital building in Snoqualmie. The Snoqualmie Tribe demolished the site to make way for elder housing.

downwind proximity to the mill’s smokestacks.The Orchard neighborhood, built in 1919, was a social

experiment to attract stable families, breaking the old ste-reotype of loggers as rough, hard-carousing men. The last house was constructed in 1924.

At its peak, the self-contained community had its own water and electricity system, post office, hotel, barber shop, hospital and YMCA, serving the mill’s 1,200 workers.

To Battey, Snoqualmie Falls was clearly an urban environ-ment.

“This was a town,” he said. “The houses were reasonably close together. Everyone felt like they were part of their indi-vidual neighborhoods.”

Vanishing townBy 1930, homes were being removed at Snoqualmie

Falls. Gradually, employees and services in Snoqualmie Falls moved into the greater Valley. Nelems Memorial Hospital, now being converted to senior housing by the Snoqualmie Tribe, replaced the Snoqualmie Falls Hospital in 1948. The bulk of the homes that could be moved were rolled across a timber bridge into Snoqualmie in the 1950s. The site of the Orchard is now a Glacier Northwest gravel pit; trees are reclaiming the other neighborhoods.

Among the last mill town agencies to close was the YMCA.

“They tried to get the rest of the Valley to keep the YMCA going,” Battey said. “It was too far out of the way. But people came to this thing from Carnation in its hey-day. It was a regional draw.”

Even after Snoqualmie Falls residents moved away, the Y remained a gathering place until it closed its doors in 1971. On June 30 of that year, the last piece of mail received its Snoqualmie Falls date stamp in the mill town’s post office.

The last generation born at Snoqualmie Falls Hospital is now in their mid-50s. Occasionally, a bewildered child of the mill town revisits Snoqualmie Falls, struggling to find a lost home.

Battey’s family farm sits just over the hill from the mill. When a visitor pulls into his driveway, he can tell at a glance whether they are searching for the lost town.

“Our house is the only thing they can recognize,” Battey said. “Sometimes they have tears in their eyes. They can’t grasp the fact that this is all gone.”

• MORE NEXT WEEK: “Ghosts of the mill town” is the � rst in a two-part series on the lost community of Snoqualmie Falls. See the full story online.

WWW.VALLEYRECORD.COM Snoqualmie Valley Record • April 14, 2010 • 3

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Return to Riverside

Valley man recalls growing up in lost mill townBY SETH TRUSCOTT

Editor

Visit the Reinig Road Sycamore Corridor, a registered King County landmark, today and you will find rows of huge, stately trees, forming a natural cathedral of arching branches and thick trunks.

But a visit with North Bend resident Harley Brumbaugh, armed with an old black and white photo, reveals a very different place.

The corridor of trees was once the Riverside neighborhood, part of the lost community of Snoqualmie Falls built around the now-closed Weyerhaeuser mill. Seven decades ago, Riverside looked like any other suburban neighborhood, with houses set back from younger, smaller sycamores, reached by con-crete steps. Today, only the trees remain.

Riverside RatsBrumbaugh grew up in Riverside. Son

of a steam shovel operator and a home-maker, he roamed the streets and meadows of Snoqualmie Falls with the boys from his neighborhood.

“We called ourselves the Riverside Rats,” Brumbaugh said. “It was a Tom Sawyer existence.”

The boys used a chicken coop for a club house. Bylaws included “No girls allowed.”

Living in Riverside meant more freedom for Brumbaugh and his pals than most children in Snoqualmie Falls. They lived closer to the urban environment of Meadowbrook than anyone else, so the boys were able to collect old beer bottles and sell them back to the tavern owners across the river.

“Kids who lived in the Orchard, on the other side of the mill, they were sort of confined,” Brumbaugh remembered.

Every Thanksgiving, boys from the two neighborhoods faced off in a touch football game. The boys had to mind their own fouls, because there was no referees.

“We had great freedom as kids,” Brumbaugh said. “But we all worked. We were expected to produce for the family.”

Brumbaugh was expected to keep the family wood pile stacked year-round. He and the other boys also helped elderly residents with their firewood.

“We had the meadows, we had swimming, fishing,” Brumbaugh said. “We had each other. We felt as though we were in a community. Nobody really screwed up. I can’t remember the police ever coming.”

Every student who attended the Snoqualmie Falls Grade

School knew each other, though enrollment fluctuated with employment.

“We got superior ratings in music,” Brumbaugh said. “It was because we had roots. We knew who we were.”

Youth lifeSetting the standard for youth behavior was Harold Keller, the

director of the community hall and YMCA in the mill town. If a teen under Keller’s eye goofed off too much, he might find him-self a persona non grata at the Y.

“There went your social life,” Brumbaugh said.Harold’s son Ward Keller remembers his

father, who ran the YMCA from 1942 to 1965, as an energetic, hard-working man.

Young people learned everything from knit-ting to rifle marksmanship at the YMCA. The senior Keller used the rivers of the Valley to teach swimming to children who didn’t have access to a pool. He went to the Arthur Murray studios to learn the latest dance steps, then taught them each year to junior high school students.

Keller said he was amazed by what the YMCA meant for young people.

“We never had any problems with kids during that time,” he said.

Sound of the millThe school, YMCA and store all overlooked the gigantic

mill and its smokestacks. Brumbaugh recalls the ambience of sound to the place.

“You could always hear the whining and the clank-clank of lumber going through,” he said. “There would be percussive jabs of whistles. The main mill whistle was a baritone — a low ‘wooh!’ You expected those things. You could see the cinders on your windowsill at school.”

An aspiring professional musician, Brumbaugh saw a dif-ferent world when he commuted to Seattle for trumpet les-sons. But he always appreciated the mill’s sense of unity.

To many longtime residents, the vanished mill town was clearly the strongest influence on the Valley of the last cen-tury. The mill’s economic engine drew workers from as far as Redmond, coalescing a community.

The community of Snoqualmie Falls began to shrink in the 1930s, and was completely gone by the early 1970s, as homes and services moved out into the greater Valley.

Most people grow up and leave their communities behind. To Brumbaugh, “Snoqualmie Falls left us.”

To Keller, the loss of the YMCA at the mill left a 45-year gap in recreation for Snoqualmie residents.

“Hopefully, this project they have at the Ridge will be the beginning of restoring the YMCA’s efforts,” he said.

Staff photo, above / Photo by Harold Keller, inset

North Bend resident Harley Brumbaugh revisits his boyhood home, the former Snoqualmie Falls neighborhood of Riverside. Where rows of homes once stood, now only the corridor of sycamores remain. Inset, the community of Riverside as it looked circa 1940. The site is now a King County historic landmark.

Mill town at the museumThe story of the Snoqualmie Falls mill and town is the Snoqualmie Valley Historical Museum’s primary exhibit for 2010. As the museum opens this month, it will feature images and stories of the town and how it changed the Valley. To learn more, visit www.sno-qualmievalleymuseum.org.

www.valleyrecord.com4 • April 14, 2010 • Snoqualmie Valley Record

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Our page 2 story this week continues the saga of the lost town of Snoqualmie Falls.

Like many locals, I was aware that there used to be a community across the river from downtown Snoqualmie. But actually seeing the shadowy remains of that town — the steps to the now-nonexistent Snoqualmie Falls Hospital, a gnarled cherry tree planted three generations ago by a long-departed Japanese student of the Falls school — was a true eye-opener. The story of Snoqualmie Falls is an amazing saga, which really hasn’t ended yet.

Part of the old town is still owned by Weyerhaeuser, where it has been reclaimed by forest. Some parts are among the mill site that Ultimate Rally Experience is negoti-ating to buy from Weyerhaeuser. If the purchase goes through as planned, owners Greg Lund and Bob Morris intend to conserve and promote the history there.

It’s impossible to give much more than an introduction to the mill town’s story in these pages. For those who would like to go deeper, the Snoqualmie Valley Historical Museum, located in downtown North Bend, is the place to go.

North Bend changesThe thought of changing commu-

nities underscores what is happening right now in North Bend. Last week, the North Bend City Council made its decision to allow a new and modern hotel on the south side of Interstate 90’s exit 31. This has been one of the most hotly contested issues in a Valley community in recent years. Meetings on the hotel plan made the Mount Si Senior Center a standing-room-only venue, and a planning commissioner resigned at the height of the furor last fall. Hundreds of people had some-thing to say on the matter, with some folks demanding a new place for visi-tors to stay, others decrying the change a national chain hotel means for their community.

Local police checked out the claims of neighbors that the site will drive up crime rates, and did find that crime will rise — but with the hotel, not neighbors, as the victim. North Bend’s city plan-ners worked to lay down design stan-dards easing a big building’s impacts on the local viewshed, but those obviously won’t please everybody. Regardless, a decision has been made, and history moves on.

Hotel raceValley communities have been in a

race for a new hotel for some time. Four communities have a stake — North Bend, Snoqualmie, the Snoqualmie Tribe and the Muckleshoots. In Snoqualmie’s city limits, a hotel has been discussed atop Snoqualmie Ridge, at the planned new campus

of Snoqualmie Valley Hospital. It’s a safe bet that the Snoqualmie Tribe will one day open a big hotel next to their casino, probably when economic times are flusher. And sooner or later, the Muckleshoot Tribe will proceed with plans to expand the Salish Lodge and Spa.

For now, North Bend has taken the lead in the lodging race.

That’s good news to folks like the entrepreneurs behind Ultimate Rally Experience, as well as other Valley businesses who would benefit from North Bend’s push to position itself as a recreation gateway. Just how bad it will be for near neighbors or the North Bend scenic landscape, only time will tell.

• E-mail Editor Seth Truscott at edi-tor@valleyrecord.com.

Publisher William Shaw wshaw@valleyrecord.com

Editor Seth Truscott struscott@valleyrecord.com Reporter Allison Espiritu aespiritu@valleyrecord.com

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Written permission from the publisher is required for reproduction of any part of this

publication. Letters, columns and guest columns do not necessarily reflect the views

of the Snoqualmie Record.

“I’m doing paperless billing and being creative by cutting

up plastic grocery bags and crocheting them into reusable

grocery bags.

Debbie ConrowNorth Bend

“If I have a chance, I do carpool.”

Jennifer BoivinSnoqualmie

“I compost and feed the birds a lot.”

Lloyd WhitehurstNorth Bend

“I recycle aluminum cans and compost.”

Stan DollarNorth Bend

Earth Day is April 22. How do you help the environment?

History rolls on at mill site,

new hotel

ValleyRecoRd

SNOQUALMIE

SETh TRuSCOTT Valley Record Editor