<< Previous   of   Next >> Alderwood Manor Heritage Association  (click to enlarge) On the south side of 196th Street Southwest in the 3100 block, the Puget Mill Company built this model home on Filbert Road at Poplar Way to promote real estate sales. Note the water tower perched on top of a tall stump. It supplied water for several nearby residences. Mr. Musiel, pictured here, is standing in what would become the northbound lanes of I-5. Enterprise/CHRIS GOODENOW  (click to enlarge) Mary Wickstrum, of Edmonds, one of the original occupants of the Humble House, points out a cluster of bricks dedicated to her family members for their donations to the park where the Humble House now resides, Monday, Sept. 22, at Heritage Park in Lynnwood. Enterprise/ CHRIS GOODENOW  (click to enlarge) Mary Wickstrum, of Edmonds, remembers living in the Humble House with her family, the original occupants of the home. She talks about her memories during an interview, Monday, Sept. 22, next to the historical home at Heritage Park in Lynnwood.

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How Lynnwood got its name

Lynnwood got its name from businesses that had already adopted it before the city was incorporated in 1959. Karl O'Beirn, a Seattle Realtor named a plat he owned Lynnwood after his wife, Lynn O'Beirn, in 1937. Eventually, other businesses, including Lynnwood Lumber Co., adopted the name and the strip of Highway 99 between 196th Street Southwest and 200th Street Southwest was full of businesses sporting the name.

CONTACT THE ENTERPRISE Jocelyn Robinson, Copy editor jrobinson@heraldnet.com

A lifetime together in Lynnwood

• Sisters remember when city was an agricultural community

By Oscar Halpert
Enterprise editor

They don't live together but Lynnwood sisters Mary Wickstrum and Janice Tutmark are about as close as sisters can be, living next door to each other.

"We have lived next door to each other for umpteen zillion years," says Mary.

Long before Lynnwood became a city in 1959, Mary and Janice lived in Alderwood Manor, a community established by the Puget Mill Logging Co. in 1917.

They arrived as children in 1934 from Seattle after their parents, Albert and Mildred Humble, swapped houses with an Alderwood Manor family that wanted to live in the city.

"My dad always wanted to live in the country," Mary says. "They read in the paper that somebody in Alderwood wanted to trade for a house in Seattle because of health reasons."

Mary calls the trade "even up," but it wasn't exactly an even trade.

"We moved into a two-room house with outdoor plumbing and they moved into a five room house with indoor plumbing," says Mary, 85.

Today, the house their parents moved into is preserved as Humble House at the city of Lynnwood's Heritage Park, 19827 Poplar Way. It houses the Sno-Isle Geneological Society's research library. Mary volunteers as a Heritage Park host each week.

"People drop in and we regale them with wonderful stories of the past," she says.

The Humble girls helped with an abundance of chores in the several years they resided at Humble House, set on 5 ½ acres, with horses, chickens, goats and other animals. They also helped their father add on to the small house.

"We helped put up the rafters," says Mary, the younger of the two sisters. "You could no more get me doing that now than fly."

Those were the days before I-5, when every homeowner had lots of land and Alderwood Manor was an egg-producing agricultural community.

"There were five or six houses along Poplar Way at that time," Mary says. "There weren't any children around that were my age. I guess the people that lived along there at that time were fairly past their youth. But neighbors knew the neighbors."

Heavy vehicle traffic along the gravely Poplar Way "was a car every 20 to 30 minutes," Mary says.

Across the street, Alderwood Manor's storied demonstration farm drew visitors from around the country. Today, a Jaguar dealership occupies space where the demonstration farm operated.

The girls attended nearby Alderwood School and Edmonds High School.

In those early days, their lives were occupied with work on the family farm and school.

"The garden was huge," Mary says. "We would can 100 quarts of beans and corn and peas. See, they didn't have freezers in those days."

At one point during the Great Depression, Mary and Janice took over their father's daily duties after he accepted a maintenance job.

"Jan and I had to chop wood and put it in the wood box," Mary says. "How many people know what a wood box is?"

Both girls later married but remained nearby.

"When my husband and I were married, we had our house by the Interurban tracks," Janice says.

The Interurban was a commuter rail line that carried passengers north and south from Seattle until 1939. Its remnant is today's Interurban Trail. The last rail car, 55, is preserved at Heritage Park.

Janice says she and her late husband, Ermin "Skeeter" Tutmark, lived in the house for 22 years, until they were "forced out" when the state built I-5.

They soon found another place to live nearby -- across from the Humble House. Mary, whose first husband, Dale Holtcamp, died in a boating accident in 1961, lived in another house next to their parents.

"It was just like a compound," Janice says.

Today, though Humble House remains, the houses Mary and Janice lived in are gone, though other historic buildings, such as the Wickers Building, grace the four-year-old Heritage Park.

Janice, 89, says she's happy that Heritage Park was established to preserve some Alderwood Manor history.

"They have resurrected two of the trees that were on the property," Mary says. "There is a walnut tree that we brought out when dad brought us out from Seattle."

There's even a Gravenstein apple tree still on site, one the sisters remembers from when they arrived in 1934.

Mary says it's important to remember history.

"Of course it's important," she says. "How else do you learn and how do you gain an appreciation of what you have?"