(click to enlarge photos)

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.