Lesser Known History of the North Cascades Vol. V.

State Highway 20 (North Cascades Highway) Milepost 104

Milepost 104 on Highway 20 is about a quarter mile east of Clark’s Cabins. On the northwest side of the road there are some large fields. At least when I was a kid they were fields. There is still a lot of open space here but there are also a lot of houses. There is also a vineyard and a winery.

When I was a kid this whole area was a series of fields owned by Karl and Dorothy Lindall. At least I think they owned them. For most of my memory, cattle were grazed here. They also grew wheat for a year or two. The wheat might have been after Karl and Dorothy were gone.

When my dad was a kid, this whole area was an orchard. I don’t know what all was grown in this orchard but I do know there were cherry trees. The summer of 1952, after his junior year in high school, my dad sat in a tree in that orchard eating cherries and watched B&W burn from almost the valley floor, an elevation of about 400 feet, to about 4000 feet in elevation. He saw the whole thing happen from beginning to end and said it all happened in about 45 minutes. He spent quite a few later years after he graduated high school on fire crews with the U.S. Forest Service.

About a quarter mile east of Lindall’s old place is the driveway to Newby’s old place. Newby’s Knob takes up the entire skyline to the northwest at this point. A little farther east are some houses along the highway that no one lives in any more. A couple named Jones lived in one of the houses when I was a kid. They were the people whose door I knocked on to call home when I got tired of running away when I was 10 or 11 years old.

I had read My Side of the Mountain one too many times. I got in trouble for lighting a fire in the back yard (practicing for when I went camping out in the woods) so I decided I would run away and do the My Side of the Mountain thing up on Corkindale Creek.

I got my gear together, extra clothes, bedding, matches, hatchet, hunting knife, .22 rifle, fishing gear and a few other things and started walking along the highway. I got about four and a half miles before I was tired and the blisters in my rubber boots became unbearable.

I camped out in a grove of small alders by the highway and lit a fire with some pitchy Douglas-fir for a starter and settled in. It was pretty comfortable. It was early spring but it wasn’t windy or rainy or snowy. After a while I got tired of looking at the fire and realized that this type of thing, at least at this point, was pretty boring (if I had actually stayed out for an extended time and had to forage my own food I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have been bored and I would have been pretty hungry too).

So I decided that it would probably be best to go home. However, I was pretty tired with some big blisters on my feet so I went to the nearest house and called home. I didn’t get into too much trouble.

The sign designating the west boundary of Marblemount is just a little further up the road (west) from Jones’s house where I called home.

Milepost 105

Milepost 105 is a quarter mile west or a little farther west of the Marblemount sign.

There is a shake mill here that hasn’t operated since sometime in the early 1990’s. When I was a little kid, my dad was a business partner with the many who operated this mill. I still remember him coming home at night with his sweatshirt wet from rain and the smell of saw gas and cedar sawdust. To a lot of folks I would imagine these sensations would be unpleasant but to me they bring back good memories.

Dad found that being in business meant he had to spend a lot of time away from home to keep things going. He wanted to spend more time with me and he and mom were also planning on having more kids that he would want to spend time with so he got out of that business and went to work for a construction company finishing Gorge Dam and, a year later, hired on with Seattle City Light.

The shake mill operated for many years, providing probably a half dozen or more good paying jobs in Marblemount. The Northwest Forest Plan, implemented in the early 1990’s, was pretty much the end of that business. The guy who owns the mill retired, though he still putters around with different things from time to time.

Across the highway from the shake mill there was a building that stood empty for as long as I can remember. Dad said that this building used to be a pool hall. It fell down a few winters ago.

For a stretch starting somewhere around the Marblemount sign to about Milepost 105, there are some building lots along the highway that are about half a lot off. So there are theoretical property lines running through people’s houses. Dad remembered when this land was bought and then sold for lots. They guy who did it did the survey by himself and evidently figured something wrong.

About a quarter mile past shake mill is cinder block bldg. I remember as kid a man named Pete Cuthbert operated a gas station and car repair shop here. Again, I have lots of good memories associated with this place that a lot of people might think strange, gasoline and grease and electric space heaters and an adding machine used to calculate people's bills. I remember Pete being a great guy. 

It was during a conversation that my dad had with Pete that I first heard about wolverines in the local vicinity. Something had been raiding a trapline and whatever it was, it was smart and acted like a wolverine. This was probably in the early 1970's. Over the following years I had heard of several wolverine sightings in the North Cascades vicinity. Sometime in the 2000's wildlife biologists managed to trap several wolverines in the North Cascades and officially "discovered" that they were present here. 

Maybe a hundred yards farther west on Highway 20 is Ranger Station Road. There was an Indian burial ground near this intersection. Of course it wasn’t an intersection then, there weren’t any roads, and burial ground probably isn’t the proper term for the place. The deceased were placed on platforms. I have heard of similar customs among other Salish people. When the flesh was gone, the bones were removed and interred somewhere else. I haven’t heard that this is specifically what happened here but I think this was the case becasue dad never mentioned any bones being buried there, only the platforms. Dad remembered my grandpa and some of the other old timers of his childhood talking about how bad this place tended to smell as they went by on the river.

I learned about the burial ground through a story my dad told about a couple of guys, whose names I don’t remember. The use as a burial ground was before my dad’s time and, again, these guys were the old timers of my dad’s childhood. The one had built the house there and the other was always asking the house builder if he was seeing any ghosts, since they were both aware of this place’s previous use as a burial ground. When I was a kid, I spent a bit of time in that house being babysat and I didn’t see or hear anything unusual or hear any of my friends who lived there for several years say they saw or heard anything unusual.   

Near the intersection of Highway and Ranger Station Road is an old shop building for a small logging outfit. This logging outfit operated well into the 1980’s employing a lot of people in the area with good wages. The owner of the company and his wife adopted four kids and raised them-not the typical stereotypical logger I often see portrayed by the anti-logging community, out to destroy beautiful nature for no apparent reason other than cash. Many loggers I have known over the years don’t fit this stereotype. They have generally been honest folks trying to make an honest living. The owner retired in the late 1980’s I think. One of his sons took over the business and ran a construction company for quite a few years afterward.

Also near the intersection of Highway 20 and Ranger Station Road is an old tavern. In it’s heyday, this was Blackie’s Tavern, advertised on the reader board as “The Last Tavern for 89 Miles” referring to the distance one would have to travel east over Highway 20 and the Pass to get to the next tavern. This was in the days when, while drinking and driving was strongly frowned upon and there were healthy penalties, the enforcement and penalties weren’t nearly as tough as they are today. .

For several decades in the 1960’s, 1970’s and 1980’s there were big dances at Blackie’s Tavern that drew huge crowds. This lasted somewhat into the early 1990’s before finally fading away. The tavern closed sometime in the early 1990’s.

Just east of Blackie’s Tavern there is a deep ditch on the north side of the road and a little farther on, a channelized stream. This is Olson Creek. Olson Creek dries up here in the summer but it used to cause a lot of problems during floods. Sometime when I was a kid, maybe in high school, they reinforced the area near the highway with gabions, heavy wire baskets filled with rock, to stabilize the stream channel and keep it under the road. This is probably one of the first places I had every seen rock gabions used.  

About a quarter mile east of Olson Creek is a large field on the north side of Highway 20 with a small Quonset hut on it’s east end. This is the site of the old Marblemount School and the Quonset hut was used for years as a bus barn for the school bus that drove the Marblemount route. It was used as a bus barn well into the 1980’s but I don’t remember exactly when they stopped using it for this purpose.

The site of the last Marblemount Elementary School is in the field just west of the Quonset hut. There were at least one or two prior to this one and one of these may have been the Rocky Creek School. Evidently the Marblemount School that predated the aforementioned school was in town, somewhere in the vicinity of the current Post Office. It was somewhere just west of the former Post Office which is in a house at the east end of town.  

Kids went through 8^th Grade in Marblemount I think. Then they went to Concrete for the rest of the grades. I think this was the arrangement when my dad was in school too. They closed the Marblemount School 3 years before I would have attended.

I remember walking through the rooms in the school before it was torn down. They had the standard fine grain old growth Douglas-fir floors and I remember pictures of all of the presidents of the United States in chronological order in one of the rooms. It also seems to me that the chalk boards were all still in place at that time. When I was 8 or 9, they tore down the main building.

There was also a gymnasium or at least a basketball court attached to the school. They left this for a year or two and I remember a lot of the local kids playing basketball there. Ironically, if I remember rightly, we couldn’t get in to play ball when the school was entire but access was pretty easy when it was only the gym.

The gym was torn down a year or two after the main school building. I don’t remember the exact reason but I imagine the school district couldn’t afford to keep the building up. A guy ended up salvaging the gym. It was made from very high quality lumber. A friend and I got permission to salvage the nails from this guy. We pulled them and straightened them and then used them to build a tree fort.

At the western edge of the field where the old Marblemount School sat, there is a large backstop for a baseball diamond. My dad salvaged this from either Newhalem or Diablo when they closed the schools there and abandoned those ball fields. We had a little league team in Marblemount and he was the coach. He put the backstop up on weekends and after work. Someone else may have helped him, probably someone did, but I don’t remember this so my apologies to any others who helped out with this project.

There was a little league team in Marblemount for quite a few years after I moved on. Then interest and maybe numbers of kids dwindled. Later there was a resurgence of T-ball and little league for a few years but Marblemount hasn’t had a Little League baseball team in years, well over a decade.

A couple hundred yards east of the old school site, on the north side of the road there is an old shake mill, no longer operating, where my dad worked for a number of years. The owner of the mill was named Harlan Blankinship and I remember my dad talking about him a lot but no specific stories. I think my dad thought a lot of this guy. I have heard that Harlan had some pretty innovative bridge building methods. He was also a pilot and built an airstrip north and east of Marblemount along the valley wall. This airstrip is now overgrown with trees, at least where there aren't houses and yards. It was turned into a development called Emerald Lane.

About a quarter mile farther along Highway 20, one enters Marblemount proper after passing through a stretch of woods. My Great Grandma, Matilda Clark Buller may have named Marblemount. The story goes that a man came into town one day and was telling everyone about a mountain of marble and Great Grandma said “We’ll have to call the town Marblemount then.” I have seen this referenced in the book Origin of Washington Place Names by Edmond S. Meany published in 1923 though it merely mentioned my Great Grandma naming the place, not anything about the guy and his mountain of marble.

I have also read an interview with Glee Davis, an early homesteader in the area, at the Skagit County Historical Museum where he relates the origin of the name of Marblemount. His was a version was little more generic, if I remember correctly, just mentioning that they always found a lot of marble in the area streams. I believe he also referenced Marble Creek up the Cascade River.

Up above Ross Lake there is a large deposit of marble that stands by itself as a sub-summit on a ridge running almost directly due east from Mount Prophet. From the right perspective, this ridge gives one the impression of a mountain, or at least a peak of marble. The guy who named Mount Prophet and the circumstances of the naming are well recorded. I don’t recall the story exactly and I don’t have the reference handy, but I wonder if it wasn’t the guy who named Mount Prophet who was in Marblemount talking about a mountain of marble. I seem to recall from the written account that this guy seemed to be prone to drama and promotion of ideas. This is just a theory and I don’t know how you would prove it.

Almost nothing is same in Marblemount as when I was small kid. And Marblemount was a quite different place when my dad was kid. The only buildings in town that are the same as when I was a kid are a restaurant on the south side of town with a log façade, the house immediately east of this restaurant, the hewed log hotel on the corner on the north side of town, the house/restaurant just past the hewed log building and the Community Hall and Fire Department building.

The rest of the buildings in town have all been built in the last 20 years after the pre-existing building was torn down. The Shell gas station on the west end of town was built in about 1995. The building that occupied this site before was torn down in the name of standardization of all the Shell gas stations. I am sure the previous building had a number of issues with it as well that made harder to do business but it was pleasant looking and had character. The current building looks like most of the other Shell gas stations in North America. The old gas station here was just a store when I was a kid, operated by a lady named Sadie Vail. The gas pumps were added later. Prior to it’s use as a store, this building was a tavern, according to my dad.

East of the Shell station there is a restaurant, currently called the Buffalo Run. When I was a kid, a building with a bat and board false front stood here. It was painted red and had white trim. There were large white letters that said Sadie’s Place over the entrance. This was an boarding house run by a lady named Sadie Cudworth. I understand that Sadie was quite the character and quite independent for a woman of her era. As I think about it, there were quite a few independent women with a lot of character in the Upper Skagit area long before anyone had ever heard of women’s liberation.

When I was about ten (1975 or so), the people who owned the building got a grant to move it. I think they wanted to use the lot for a restaurant and needed the building out of the way but still wanted to preserve it as for its historical value. I have heard that some of the structural elements of the building were too rotten to stabilize to move, making the structure unstable, or, they didn’t know what they were doing (I don’t mean to be too critical here, I don’t claim to know how to move a building), which would also make the structure unstable. I guess when they tried to move it, it almost fell on several of them. So it was torn down, or maybe more accurately, it fell down and a restaurant was built on the site. It was over 30 years before I could set foot in that restaurant and by then different people owned it.

Where the Post Office is now was a vacant lot when I was a kid and it remained this way until the mid or late 1990’s when they built the present building.

Just east of the Post Office is the aforementioned restaurant with a log façade. This building was a store for years, and was remodeled in late 1980’s early 1990’s to have the logs façade put on.

The house just east of store has been there since before my time. The lower front rooms of this house were used as the Post Office until the 1990’s when the Post Office was moved to its present location.

Across the street from the Post Office and restaurant, on the north side of town is another gas station. When I was a kid this was Merv’s Service, a service station operated by Merv Peterson. It was in a cement building right along the Highway. The gas pumps were between the station and the highway and if your rig was on the highway side when you were filling up, you were just off the white line. This was a neat place. Merv also had a lift for car repairs and tools for tire repair as well as carrying a small selection of hardware. A lot of the local kids worked here in the summer, back when gas stations were full service.

This building was torn down, in the late 1990’s, I believe, when they widened the highway through town and added a center turn lane. You can still see the slab where the old service station was. There is an espresso stand on part of it.

Just east of the gas station at the sharp corner on the east end of town is a square log building with dove-tail joints. When I was a kid, this was mainly a restaurant. It is now a hotel, the Buffalo Run, associated with the restaurant across the street.

This building was originally built as a boarding house. The current sign along the highway says it was built in 1885 but I think this is wrong by a couple of years.  My grandpa helped build this place and he wasn’t here until 1888. They rough split timbers out of some big cedar logs on Illabot Creek and hauled or floated the  timbers to the building site and then hewed them to size with broadaxes. This building is a good example of the high degree of skill with hand tools that people possessed in those days.

This building may have been moved since it was built but it has been in the same place my whole life.

The ferry across the Skagit River was directly east of the sharp corner at the east end of Marblemount. The steel bridge that is there now has been there for all of my life. I think it actually predates the bridge over the Skagit for Highway 530 in Rockport by quite a few years. There used to be a house on the flat below the bridge but it got submerged every time the river flooded so they finally tore it down some time in the 1990’s I think. There are stories of people walking caterpillar tractors across the Skagit in this area before there was a bridge. I imagine they had to wait for low water to cross. I understand that as long as the exhaust was still exposed, the engines would operate just fine underwater.  It would have been a very cold trip for the person operating the cat.

There is a house/restaurant just around the corner (north) of the hewed log building. I don’t know when this was built but it has been there my entire life. The restaurant was added sometime in the late 1990’s or early 2000’s.

Just north of the house/restaurant is the Marblemount Community Hall. This has been there my entire life as well. The history of this place is pretty well recorded, at least in the Community Hall papers. The property was donated by Frank Pressentin’s wife Mabel and The building was a surplus bunkhouse left over from the construction of the Upper Baker Dam in Concrete. The Marblemount Community Club acquired the building and moved it to its present location in about 1957, I believe. The shake siding was cut from cedar at the present site of the Colonial Creek Campground when this was still in the hands of the U. S. Forest Service.

For its entire history, the Community Club/Hall has always been a non profit community service organization but in recent years there have been problems with its non profit status. The mission hasn’t changed but it’s non profit status is not one that qualifies for a lot of tax breaks or encourages donations. An attempt is being made to change the status to a 501 (c)(3). The hall is presentable but not pretty. It is real though, and it is all we have and all we are likely to ever have for a secular gathering place for the people who live in the Upper Skagit. I am hoping it will continue to exist for future generations. It may not.

The Fire Hall is across the parking lot from the Community Hall and actually rents the land from the Community Hall. It has been there for as long as I can remember but it hasn’t been there as long as the Community Hall.

I mentioned the mountain B&W earlier in the post. It isn’t named on maps but it is the big knob at the point of the junction of the Skagit and Cascade River valleys. It is the end of a ridge running southwest from Lookout Mountain and it is almost directly northeast of Marblemount dominating the valley in that direction.  

After the fire people started calling it B&W for Bartell and Weeden, the logging outfit that started the fire, if I have it right. Two people were killed on that fire, a father and son. It looked like the father had actually had a heart attack and may have even been dead by the time the fire reached them. The son may have had a chance to escape but stayed behind. If I remember correctly, they didn’t burn, it was smoke and heat that got them, or the son anyway. I don’t know what their names were. There is the wreck of a truck off of one of the switchbacks on the road up this mountain and I often wondered if that was the rig they were in, though it might be from something else.

Before the fire it was called Scotty’s Knob for a guy named Scotty (my dad told me his last name but I have forgotten it) who lived at its base. My dad had a story about Scotty. Someone, whose name I have also forgotten was taking a bunch of cedar out in the area and got permission to use Scotty’s road. This road probably wasn’t a modern, engineered road built with solid fill and all of the hauling created a great big sinkhole in the road. This was patched up, or at least camouflaged by throwing great piles of cedar spalts (waste wood) into the hole and giving it light covering of dirt. Well, it rained, as it often does here and Scotty was on his way into town or on some other errand when his wagon fell into the sinkhole and got stuck. Needless to say there were some pretty hard feelings over the whole affair.  

I worked on a logging job on B&W in the winter and early spring of 1995. It burned that year also. The fire started in May if I remember it right. It was the day before the official start of fire season which helped save the logging outfit’s bacon. If it had been during fire season, they would have been liable for damages. That was a very dry spring with day after day of clear hot weather all through April and May. The haulback from the yarder ignited the fire as it threw sparks off from rubbing some rocks.

It was fortunate that no one was killed or hurt and there was minimal damage to the equipment. It was also fortunate for me because I worked for this outfit for many years during my off seasons with the Park Service. This work was dangerous but it paid much better than the seasonal wages I was getting and it definitely helped my financial stability.

More in the next post. 

The ridge running east from Mount Prophet. The gray stone in the peak on the left is solid marble or at least a significant deposit of marble. It looks like there is a lot of iron here too as evidenced by the rusty red color on the left shoulder of the marble peak. Mount Prophet proper is just out of the frame to the left. From this perspective this ridge appears to be the dominant feature. Mount Prophet is actually quite a bit higherthough. When I first saw this marble peak from fairly close, something in the back of my mind told me that the color of the rock was odd but I just shrugged it off, assuming that it was granite like much of the other rock in these parts. It wasn't until I was walking through the scree below the peak that I realized it was marble. I was walking through a talus slope made up of marble. 

Same location as previous photo, different perspective.

Another view of the marble peak. 

This is Mount Prophet from Sourdough Mountain looking across Big Beaver Valley.  The marble peak is the third peak from the left on the skyline and should be recognizable from the first photo in this series. The summit of Mount Prophet is the first peak from the left I believe. There are also marble deposits on some of the ridges running from the west side of Mount Prophet. 

Another view of Mount Prophet from the Sourdough Mountain area. This photo doesn't really add any more information to this post. I just liked the color of the lake in the foreground and the way the clouds reflected on it.