Larsen Lake Cabin

The next of our five Bellevue cabins is located at the Larsen Lake Blueberry Farm off SE 8th and 148th SE. It was also relocated in 1990 from its original location near Phantom Lake and today serves as a trailhead and link to the Bellevue’s Lake to Lake trail system.

2002.135.01 - Possibly the Larsen Lake Blueberry Farm, circa 1930.

In March 1886, German immigrant, Henry Thode, purchased two tracts of land near Phantom Lake and built a house in 1894.  It was a two-story nine room log house made with hand-hewn logs and shingled on the outside.  Henry and his wife Emilia intended to farm, raise cattle and sell milk to the coal workers at Newcastle.  However, Henry was declared insane later that year and committed to a mental institution. 

He died two years later and Emilia remarried Jacob Kamber.  They continued to live in the Phantom Lake House.

In 1932, Shigeo Masunaga and his wife, Taki, leased the Thode House and farmed ten acres.  The family was forced to leave in April 1942 and were incarcerated at Pinedale, California.  They did not return to Bellevue.

After the war, John Matsuoka leased the Phantom Lake land from Mondo Desimone who now owned the land.  John farmed about 40 acres of the property growing fruit and vegetables. The Matsuoka’s lived in the house until 1966.  The dwellings were abandoned after John and his family moved.

2013.050.001 - House being moved in 1989. Yeizo Masunaga, Yeizo's wife, and Mrs. Taki Masunaga at left.

In 1989, the Danieli family donated the site of the Thode Cabin to the city of Bellevue and moved it to Larsen Lake in 1990.  Renovations were undertaken to preserve and highlight the original construction methods and integrity of the cabin.  A foundation, flooring, stairway, roof, and porch were all replaced.  The shingles were also removed showing the original log walls.

If you are walking around Larsen Lake and the Lake Hills Greenbelt, do stop and check out the “Thode House”. This is an easy cabin to visit even though the inside is not open to the public.  A porch with a swing is located at the front of the house and a seasonal farm stand next door.  At the cabin enjoy the swing and take a look at the hand-hewn logs (Fraser Cabin’s logs were machine hewed).

 Resources:

“The Bellevue Story” Connie Squires, 1967

“Bellevue: It’s First 100 Year” Lucile McDonald, 1984

Asachi Tsuchima, 1952, “Pre-WWII History of Japanese Pioneers in the Clearing and Development of Land in Bellevue”

The Campbell Lumber Mill

By Steve Williams, EASTSIDE HERITAGE CENTER VOLUNTEER

One hundred and sixteen years ago in 1905, a huge lumber mill began operations at the northeast corner of Lake Sammamish in Washington State. James Campbell and L.B. Stedman invested $100,000 (over 30 million in today's dollars) and logged a major portion of the land east of the lake during the next two decades. They built an entire company town at Adelaide to support the mill; including a store, hotel, blacksmith shop, tool house, foreman family home and bunkhouses for 50 men.

Key to the whole operation was the Lake Shore and Eastern Railroad which ran along the shoreline between the mill and town. It had been been built by Daniel Gillman in 1889 and provided direct shipment to Seattle and other northwest destinations. Seattle expanded from a population of 3,533 in 1880 to 237,194  in 1910, and all those people needed housing. Because the railroad was there first, most of the mill was actually built on pilings extending out over Lake Sammamish.

OR/L 79.79.145 - Campbell Mill, Lake Sammamish, 1905.

The lumber company had three locomotives of its own and laid 16 miles of track across the virgin timber lands east of Redmond and Lake Sammamish. Bunkhouses for the lumberjacks were built on rail car frames and could be hauled into the woods to the end of spur lines where the trees were being cut. The logs were hauled back to the mill location, also called Campton, and were dumped in the lake for storage until they could be milled into lumber. The water washed off dirt and rocks, and prevented drying out – all of which was better for the saw blades. “Ponding” also allowed the logs to be easily sorted and moved about, and that resulted in pilings and large log booms at the north end of the lake. Old timers said that “There were so many logs that you could practically walk from one side of the lake to the other on them.”

OR/L 79.79.061 - Weber's Tug Boat, "Daisy."

The Campbell Mill operated for nineteen years, but was lost to fire in 1924 when the firemen discovered that their unused hoses had rotted and were full of holes. Many early mills and houses suffered the same fate as embers from wood-burning stoves and steam engines dropped onto wood-shinged roofs. The Lake Sammamish Shingle Mill was also located on the east shore, just south at Weber Point, and The Monohon Mill was further south towards the end of the lake near Issaquah. Beginning in the 1880's, Redmond had at least 12 different mills, but the big time logging was nearly done by 1930.  Within 50 years most of the old growth prime timber had been cut and the land was ready for stump-pulling, row-farming and dairy herds.

Today, if you go boating at the north end of Lake Sammamish you can discover rows of pilings that once supported the mill or held the log booms in place. Now, those pilings make a great protective nursery for young fish, and a hangout for all sorts of ducks and other wildlife. You can also join the Mountains to Sound Greenway in planting conifer seedlings to do your part in restoring a bit of northwest forest. Our forests help limit climate change by storing carbon, reducing flooding, evaporation and lowering temperatures. The extraction economy of a century ago is being replaced by a restoration economy of carbon credits and tree planting today.

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Resources

“Our Town Redmond” by Nancy Way, Marymoor Museum, Redmond, Washington 1989.

“Index of Lumber Businesses & Mills” by Eric Erickson, Issaquah Historical Society 2003.

“Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition”by Shauna & Brennan O'Reilly, Arcadia Publishing 2009.

“Seattle in the 1880's” by David Buerge, The Historical Society of Seattle and King County, 1986.

Redmond Historical Society website - www.redmondhistoricalsociety.org 2021.

Photos from Eastside Heritage Center collection

Fraser Cabin

The city of Bellevue is fortunate to have five historic cabins, all located in Bellevue City Parks. They were built between the 1880s and the 1890s:  Fraser Cabin at Kelsey Creek Park; Hans Miller Cabin at Robinswood Park; Sharp Cabin at the Bellevue Botanical Garden; Thode Cabin at Larsen Lake; and the Burrows Cabin at Chism Beach Park. Only the Fraser Cabin is open for viewing.

The Fraser cabin was originally built in 1888 by two Norwegian loggers who were known for their ability to build log bridges across a ravine in one day. The 16 ft. x 16 ft. cabin was located near the present day Northup Way and 124th St. about a ½ mile from the Fraser’s home. It was built for Daniel Fraser’s sister-in-law, Fanny, and her new husband Steven Rathbun. The newlyweds lived there about a year before moving to Massachusetts. 

2014.005.009 - Crowd gathered outside of the Fraser Cabin, Boy Scouts flag on flagpole. Undated.

When the Fraser’s main house was destroyed by fire in 1890, the cabin was moved to the homesite and later converted to a horse barn. In 1947, Daniel’s son, Don, moved the cabin to the corner of 126th NE and NE 7th. The logs were taken down and numbered as to assure accurate reassembly.

Eventually, Brooks Johnston purchased the property and used the former cabin as a horse barn. Johnston donated the cabin to the King County Parks Department in 1966, but there was a lack of funding for moving it to Marymoor Park. In 1974, Siegfried Semrau, Director of Parks and Recreation for the City of Bellevue Parks Department, accepted the cabin and it was moved to Kelsey Creek Park. Thanks to many generous donors, the cabin was reassembled with new walls, floor, roof, door, and windows and in May of 1975, the City of Bellevue held a Bicentennial Community Designation ceremony at Kelsey Creek.

L 88.064.007 - Siegfried Semrau, Verna Schembrie, Brooks Johnston with the refurbished Fraser Cabin at Kelsey Creek Park. Circa 1974.

Because of flood mitigation, the cabin was moved again in 2008 to its present location just south of the barns. Thanks to some creative engineering, the entire structure was moved up the hill and placed on a new foundation. A new ramp was built to make it more accessible to all.

Eastside Heritage Center opens the cabin during major events: Sheep Shearing and the Farm Fair. It is also open to the public one Saturday a month from May through September.

Resources

Eastside Heritage Center Archives

Eastside Stories: Logging the Eastside

No. 2 | February 20, 2019

Eastside Stories

Subscribe to Eastside Stories by emailing us at: info@eastsideheritagecenter.org

Eastside Stories is our way of sharing Eastside history through the many events, people places and interesting bits of information that we collect at the Eastside Heritage Center. We hope you enjoy these stories and share them with friends and family.

Welcome to Eastside Stories, a new series from the Eastside Heritage Center. Through these periodic postings we will bring Eastside History to life and highlight the people, places, and events that have shaped its remarkable evolution.

Logging the Eastside

When the first intrepid settlers made their way to the Eastside in the 1860s, mostly what they found were trees. Really big trees.

As with so many things in life, this presented both a problem and an opportunity. The problem was that most settlers wanted to do what most Americans did at that time: farm. The Homestead Act of 1862 made land pretty much free for the grabbing, and as the area around the town of Seattle got carved up, settlers headed across and around Lake Washington to stake their claims and start farming. But there were those trees—up to 150 feet tall and several feet across.

The opportunity was to turn those trees into dollars.

A crew from the Siler Logging Co. in Redmond cut a large cedar tree. The loggers on the upper left and right are standing on spring boards.

(OR/L 79.79.044)

The Puget Sound area had its start as timber country. The first commercial transaction in the new metropolis of Seattle (the Denny Party huddled in a cabin on Alki Point) consisted of the sale of a load of logs to a schooner captain for use as pilings in San Francisco Bay. The rapid growth of San Francisco after the Gold Rush provided a ready market for lumber, shingles, and pilings.

Getting those enormous logs to mills and ships presented a challenge. Water was the answer, and the timber cutters made their way along the many miles of shoreline on Puget Sound, gradually working their way inland. But since Lake Washington still lacked a good connection to Puget Sound, getting Eastside logs to mills was impossible at first. So the earliest Eastside settlers clearing their farms often had no choice but to burn the logs.

A locomotive belonging to the Hewitt and Lee logging company in Bellevue hauls a load of logs. (2002.147.004)

Three important changes, beginning in the 1880s, made Eastside logging profitable. First, mills began to spring up along Lake Washington, and then gradually inland. It would always make more sense to ship higher value lumber and shingles than to transport logs, so mills followed the loggers inland. A number of the largest mills were around Lake Sammamish, which was served by early rail lines.

Second, transportation improved. In 1885 a log sluice opened in Montlake, between Lake Washington and Portage Bay. This ditch had a gate at the upper end (Lake Washington was about nine feet higher than Portage Bay at that time) which was opened to let rushing water carry logs to the mills along Lake Union. Railroads began to extend across the Eastside in the 1880s, allowing easier shipping of logs and lumber.

Employees at Webber's Shingle Mill on Lake Sammamish. (OR/L 79.79.049)

Third, mechanization began to take over. Steam powered donkey engines pulled logs from hillsides and gullies using steel cables known as “wire rope.” Hand saws and axes were replaced with mechanized harvesting equipment. Trucks replaced horses and oxen.

By the 1920s, most of the Eastside had been logged off. Remaining smaller trees that were not worth cutting for timber, and are often seen standing alone in photos of the period, were taken for pulp. As timber was cut and stumps removed, farms spread across the Eastside. Aerial photos from the 1930s show few heavily wooded areas, with most of the Eastside taken up by farms and sparse second-growth forests. 

Today, a sharp-eyed observer can see evidence of early logging. Western Red Cedar rots very slowly, and original stumps can be found in second growth forests around the Eastside. On the sides of many of these stumps, notches for springboards—platforms that allowed loggers to cut above the fat base of the tree--can still be seen. 

Looking at the mature residential areas and dense second growth forests of the Eastside, it can be hard to imagine that 100 years ago most of the Eastside was quite barren. Fortunately those big trees have a way of growing back to provide us with beauty, shade and oxygen.

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Our Mission To steward Eastside history by actively collecting, preserving, and interpreting documents and artifacts, and by promoting public involvement in and appreciation of this heritage through educational programming and community outreach.

Our Vision To be the leading organization that enhances community identity through the preservation and stewardship of the Eastside’s history.

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Eastside Heritage Center is supported by 4 Culture