The First County
Seat
LaConner, which had a reputation for
being the 'stylish' town back in 1884, was
Skagit's first county seat. The office was in the
lower floor of the LaConner school building in an
8X12-foot room, with county records kept in a
soap box nailed to the wall. LaConner fully
expected to be made the permanent county seat,
but when it came to a vote, Mount Vernon beat
LaConner for the honor, 796 votes to 567.
Summer
School
If you could make it through the eighth
grade, you could teach school, in Skagit County's
early days. School sessions were three months
long, and because getting there often required
walking miles, school was usually held for three
months in the summer. Teaching jobs paid between
$40 and $50 a month.
Cheap
Sleeps
Skagit County's hotels aren't what they
used to be - fortunately. Mount Vernon's first
hotel, built in 1877 was one room and a kitchen,
with a loft overhead, reached by climbing a
ladder through a trap door, and lighted by a
tallow candle, where travelers spread their
blankets to sleep. Of course, a hearty bacon and
egg supper was included.
Another hotel, opened in LaConner in 1877, also
served as a jail, hospital, poorhouse, and
detention center for people bound for the
territorial asylum, as well as lodging for
Congressional delegates, judges, and the
territorial governor.
No
Peeking!
When Mount
Vernon's Lincoln School was built in 1891, boys
and girls were kept separate at recess by a high
board fence, which divided the playground.
Peeping through knot holes was forbidden, but it
didn't stop boys from throwing dead snakes over
the fence at their segregated female schoolmates.
Smugglers
Two of Skagit County's favorite old-time
smugglers were Ben Ure and Lawrence Kelly, who
used local islands as bases for sneaking illegal
Chinese immigrants, opium, and alcohol past U. S.
Customs agents.
Ure operated from a small island, 'Ben Ure's
Island,' near Deception Pass. While Ure smuggled,
his wife camped on the island near a fire she
used to signal her husband as to whether customs
agents were around. It took agents a long time to
decipher the couple's simple code; if agents were
around Ure's wife sat in front of the fire, if
the coast was clear, she sat behind it.
Known as the King of Smugglers and Pirate Kelly,
Lawrence Kelly operated from bases on Guemes and
Sinclair Islands. After a 35-year smuggling
career that ended with a second trip to the
penitenary, where he served another year-long
term, Kelly was released in 1910 into a home for
Conferderate veterans, when he spent the
remainder of his days.
The
Edison Gold Rush
Gold brought
thousands of prospectors up the Skagit River, but
the great Edison gold rush was nothing but a
hoax.
Late one May night in 1891, a logging camp cook
swaggered into a local saloon with a lot of
gold-colored dust, and let on that he'd found it
on some nearby land in Edison. That sparked a
rush, and hopeful prospectors spent the rest of
the night staking out claims by lantern light,
then rousing the justice of the peace out of bed
sometime after midnight to register the claims.
They kept him up until dawn.
The truth came out when one of the would-be
prospectors declared his intention that morning
to head for Seattle to have the bag of 'gold
dust' he'd collected assayed. To stop him,
practical jokers confessed that they had filed
all that 'gold dust' from several pieces of
bronze and brass, which they'd salted over the
property under cover of dark.
'Bug-Woolley?'
People in Sedro-Woolley might be living
in Bug-Woolley, if Mortimer Cook had his way. The
first entrepreneur in the Sedro part of what is
now Sedro-Woolley, Cook built a shingle mill, a
wharf on the Skagit River, and a store, and named
the settlement Bug. Some say he named it after
the 'bat-sized mosquitos that bedevil loggers.'
Others say he wanted a name no one else would
copy. The name didn't fly with his wife, or
neighbors, though, so the town was renamed
'Sedro,' a misspelling of cedro the
Spanish word for cedar.
The Woolley part of Sedro Woolley comes from the
rival town, a mile away, named by mill owner,
Philip Woolley. After years of intense rivalry,
the two towns merged in 1898. Some locals insist
that the town's name isn't spelled correctly if
it isn't hypenated as 'Sedro-Woolley.'
