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Published in The Seattle Times online on June 26, 2025
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on June 29, 2025

Lake Sammamish town’s fiery 1925 demise echoes today

By Jean Sherrard

History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes. Accordingly, burning 100 years ago were conflagrations whose embers rekindle today with the threat of literal and figurative five-alarm fires.

On Thursday, June 25, 1925, the thermometer atop Seattle’s18-story Hoge Building recorded the then-warmest temperature in Northwest history. As the mercury climbed to 98 degrees, the city’s two major dailies sported banner weather headlines.

Although “numerous small fires” had broken out across Western Washington, the Seattle Times assured its readers that “they were reported under control.” Further, “fire wardens [will] exercise every precaution as long as the dry weather remains.”

The next day, however, hopes evaporated when the Lake Sammamish mill town of Monohon, four miles north of Issaquah, went up in smoke. The fire began just after noon, reported the Post-Intelligencer’s R.B. Bermann, when “a cigarette tossed aside in the [sawmill’s] washroom started a conflagration which raged unchecked until the whole settlement was virtually destroyed.”

Along with dozens of homes, Monohon’s railroad depot, hotel, general store and the J.E. Bratnober sawmill were “blotted from the earth,” Bermann said, “as though some gigantic monster had stepped on [them], crushing everything to the ground.”

The intense heat had shriveled vegetables on their vines and blackened trees within hundreds of yards. Young chickens in their coops were “baked to a crisp.”

Firefighting efforts were stymied when the road running through town was engulfed in flames. Inadequate hoses and pumps having failed, “attempts to check [the fire] with dynamite … blew blazing timbers all over town, starting dozens of new fires.”

Historian Phil Dougherty, whose HistoryLink essay offers a thorough and colorful account of the disaster and its aftermath, wrote, “The mill rebuilt and survived

in various incarnations until 1980, but Monohon itself was gone.” Though no deaths or injuries were reported, “everything that had made this little town of 300 souls almost the Valhalla of Lake Sammamish — gone.”

A century later, these events continue to send up smoke signals.

The National Forest Service, whose hotshot crews of firefighters have battled wilderness infernos for the past hundred years, has been decimated by workforce cuts from the Trump administration.

As recently detailed in The Seattle Times, significant personnel losses are reported by individual forests across Washington state.

Forest Service officials privately predict disaster for the upcoming fire season, one Washington manager saying that without experienced employees, “the West will burn.”

This is one rhyme we can only hope against hope not to repeat.

WEB EXTRAS

Noting a compass correction: As several readers have commented, Monohon is not 4 miles west of Issaquah, but due north. I was misled by the P-I article printed the day after the fire, which sent me in the wrong direction!

Click on through for our narrated 360 degree video.

A fascinating and somewhat alarming side note: only two weeks later, on July 10, 1925, the Scopes “monkey trial” was about to commence, in which the pugnacious perennial populist presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan prosecuted a science teacher who broke a Tennessee law forbidding mention of evolution in the classroom. On the Scopes trial centennial, a bell tolls for scientific inquiry and education, ringing out another rhyming echo.

UPDATE: Congrats to Sunset Hill Community Hall, which will receive Historic Seattle’s 2025 Community Advocacy Award at the organization’s annual Preservation Celebration on Sept. 25, 2025, at the Labour Temple downtown. For more info, click here.

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Published in The Seattle Times online on June 19, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on June 22, 2025

For nearly a century, Sunset Hill clubhouse has built community

By Clay Eals

We all revere the concept of community, but how do we put it into practice? It boils down to joining forces for the common good — for desired improvements and mutual enjoyment. And as with many things, it can be as much about perception as reality.

In 1929, University of Washington master’s student Irene Somerville Durham documented Seattle’s then-108 community clubs, mostly in middle-class and working-class residential neighborhoods. She related the legend of two north-end gents repeatedly stumbling into puddles in the dark and failing to persuade the city to illuminate the area.

One “conceived the bold idea of getting out some letterheads with a community-club name, calling himself the president and his neighbor the secretary. On behalf of this mythical organization, the two demanded a street light in front of their houses. Within a week … the light was in the desired spot.” The letterhead originator “thought the secret too good to keep, and the community-club movement had its beginning.”

Within Ballard, annexed to Seattle in 1907, the western sub-neighborhood of Sunset Hill (from the Locks to the city’s then-northern border of 85th Street) spawned a club in 1922. Two years hence, it bought land at the southwest corner of 66th Street and 30th Avenue. By 1929, the club’s stately home — with two large meeting floors, the upper one with a stage — opened for meetings and parties alike.

It remains a happy survivor, along with similar neighborhood clubhouses in Mount Baker (1914), Lakewood-Seward Park (1920), Haller Lake (1922) and Rainier Beach (1923). A few other such structures also endure citywide but in other uses.

With a succession of four names (Community Hall is the latest), the Sunset Hill club stated from the start that it welcomed all residents of the district, historically a Nordic American enclave that gradually has diversified. From securing street, water and transit improvements to presenting speeches, dances and performances, its leaders apprised members: “You are part of an organization that is getting results, and you would find great pleasure in doing your part.”

This rich mixture of the political and social over a near-century of service allowed the gleaming yellow hall to attain designation as a city landmark in March. The hall’s response was — what else? — to hold a party the following month, drawing a capacity crowd.

John Munroe, the club’s energetic president, acknowledges herculean efforts to keep intact both the building and its legacy.

“We’ve done tons of work on it over the years,” he says. “We will survive anything … We have all kinds of fun all the time because this is a community.”

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Robert Loe, John Munroe and especially Holly Taylor and Peggy Sturdivant for their invaluable help with this installment!

To see Clay Eals‘ 360-degree video of the “Now” prospect and compare it with the “Then” photos, and to hear this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column.

Below, you also will find 2 additional videos, 2 documents and 5 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com, Washington Digital Newspapers and other sources, all of which were helpful in the preparation of this column.

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Published in The Seattle Times online on June 12, 2025
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on June 15, 2025

Tallest US Masonry Dome stands as our state’s homage to democracy

By Jean Sherrard

A visit to Olympia, which I highly recommend, is a tonic for what ails us. From the lofty architecture of the Legislative Building (aka the Capitol Building) to the generous, Olmsted Brothers-designed landscape, the sense of uplift is palpable.

As in our nation’s capital, the edifices of government were designed to reflect neo-classical themes of the Enlightenment, plus a shout-out to ancient Greece, the birthplace of democracy.

In an era when, increasingly, questions arise about the legitimacy and efficacy of our democratic republic, these soaring expressions of harmony, proportion and humanism offer enduring comfort.

First, a few pertinent facts:

Our state Capitol building, at 287 feet, is the tallest masonry dome in the United States and among the tallest in the world. The dome itself weighs 30.8 million pounds. The building’s exterior is made of warm-colored Wilkeson sandstone from Pierce County. Built to last, the structure has survived three major earthquakes, most recently the Nisqually Earthquake in 2001, followed by three years of seismic upgrades and structural rehabilitation.

In their authoritative overview, “Temples of Democracy: The State Capitols of the U.S.A.,” architectural historians Henry-Russell Hitchcock and William Seale suggest that in Olympia, “the American renaissance in state capitol building reached its climax.”

The long road to achieving this ideal began when Olympia founder Edmund Sylvester donated a 12-acre

bluff as a site for the territorial Capitol. In 1856, the Legislature moved into a two-story wood-frame building on the site, which served first the territory and then the state until 1903.

Early plans for the capitol campus had been shelved following the 1893 financial Panic. The governor

authorized purchase of the Thurston County Courthouse, in whose cramped quarters the Legislature met beginning in 1905.

In 1911, a new State Capitol Commission held a nationwide design competition, enlisting Seattle architect Charles Bebb to serve as lead judge. Out of 30 mostly local submissions, two architects from New York City seized the prize.

For Walter Wilder and Harry White, junior architects in their mid-30s, designing the group of capitol buildings was their first and only major commission. Unexpectedly, their work stretched over the next 18 years.

When announcing the award, the commission also wired the Olmsted Brothers — the renowned Brookline, Mass., landscape firm already known for its many Washington state contributions — asking if they could “prepare plans for Capitol Building grounds.”

The Olmsted designs were adopted and installed by 1930. Their addition of verdant gardens, trees and wide boulevards completed our state’s graceful, human-scaled homage to nascent democracy in a city quite fittingly named Olympia.

WEB EXTRAS

Here’s a “now” of the Thurston County Courthouse, purchased for use by the legislature.

For our narrated 360 degree video of this column, click on through here, pardner!

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Published in The Seattle Times online on June 5, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on June 8, 2025

Road trip! AAA’s early 20th century arrows showed us the way

By Clay Eals

Talk about signs of the times …

Most of us know that automobiles rumbled into general use roughly 120 years ago. However, we don’t think much about the roads on which they rolled. Initially, many were unmarked, and without GPS or phone apps, how did drivers know which path to choose? Printed maps helped. But what if you were mapless and came to a fork in the road? While governmental road signs guide us today, it was not always thus.

Enter the nation’s upstart auto clubs, some of which affiliated with the national American Automobile Association (AAA or Triple-A), founded in Chicago in 1902. Soon afterward in our state came the launch of what became the Auto Club of Western Washington, organizational ancestor of today’s AAA Washington.

Over the years, the club advocated for quality byways and safety education and became known for emergency road service, maps and travel advice. But through the mid-1940s, it also built countless directional signs and installed them at key intersections.

The club installed its first signs in 1906, planning 500 pointers within 30 miles of Seattle. Twelve years later, the club reported that “at least” 1,500 signs had been placed on 3,200 miles of roads and streets in western Washington. “This, however, is just a start.”

The white-painted signs were instantly visible and recognizable — a bouquet of arrows pointing every which-way, identifying places near and far, with numbers indicating mileage. An accompanying diamond-shaped sign identified the club, an ingenious brand for a captive driving audience.

In both urban and rural settings, the signs became ubiquitous. Guidance and safety were an obvious part of their motivation and appeal. But an equal factor, the club said in 1920, was aesthetics: “We want to rid our splendid scenic highways of the signs on trees and stumps and rocks along the right-of-way, which distract so seriously from their beauty.”

Pointing out everything from telephone booths and scout camps to speed limits and speed traps (!), the signs drew “innumerable compliments” for “assisting the stranger.” The club spent $300,000 on sign installations from 1916 to 1945, when signage became the legal responsibility of cities, counties and the state.

The club maintained sign shops and took pride in photographing the signs when installing them. Many surviving prints, however, bear no dates or documentation of their locations.

Even so, it’s fun to view them today. Eyeing their posted place names and doing the mileage math, we can speculate about the intersections where they once stood sentinel to show us the way.

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Bob Carney, Cindi Barker and especially Sam Murphy, Mellani McAleenan and Kelsey Bumsted of AAA Washington for their invaluable help with this installment!

To see Clay Eals‘ 360-degree video of the “Now” prospect and compare it with the “Then” photos, and to hear this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column.

Below, you also will find 5 additional photos, 2 AAA Journeys magazine stories from 2004 by Paul Dorpat and Jean Sherrard, and 1 historical clip from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com, Washington Digital Newspapers and other sources, all of which were helpful in the preparation of this column.