Farm visitors take a step back in time

Published 9:00 pm Wednesday, August 2, 2006

ELLENSBURG – There’s a very real presence at Olmstead Place State Park, the pioneer farm homestead four miles east of Ellensburg, but it’s not a ghost.

Take a tour of the 1875 cabin or the 1908 farmhouse on the south end of North Ferguson Road and you’ll see tools, clothes, fading photos, silverware, scrapbooks and the everyday stuff of life as it was before and after the turn of the last century.

It looks like the old-time Kittitas Valley residents of the farm just stepped out for a Sunday box-lunch social.

“I think people visiting the farm get a real sense that people lived here, and a feeling they could still be living here,” said Olmstead Place State Park Ranger Arnold Hampton. “There’s a real presence about the place that takes you back in time.”

Free tours of the farmhouse and cabin, along with tractor-drawn wagon rides, are offered noon to 4 p.m. each Saturday and Sunday from Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day weekend.

The farm includes the Red Barn, which has agricultural displays and hands-on activities sponsored and operated by the Pomona Grange. Old-time farm implements are displayed outside the barn and in equipment sheds.

There are other outbuildings as well, including a milk house and dairy barn.

On the north end of the park is displayed the Seaton Cabin School House, an 1870s pioneer school moved in 1980 to the site from a meadow several miles from the park.

The 217-acre farm is juxtaposed next to a busy, zooming Interstate 90. This provides touring visitors a stark contrast between a slower time in America’s past and the shiny, loud and fast times of the present.

Fern Mettler likes to lead visitors into that slower pace of life. Many of the house and cabin tours are led by Mettler, 80, of Ellensburg, now into her seventh year guiding visitors back to another time and another America.

“I can relate to this house and to the Olmstead and Smith families that lived here because I grew up on a Missouri farm myself and lived in homes as old as this,” Mettler said. “From 1950 to 1956, I lived with my husband in a large log house that was built in 1865 as a school.”

The Olmstead farm, now a seven-day-a-week, day-use state park, was deeded to the Washington State Parks &Recreation Commission in 1968 by sisters Leta May Smith and Clareta Olmstead Smith, granddaughters of Sarah and Samuel Olmstead, who came to the valley in 1875.

The sisters, both teachers, stipulated that the house and cabin not be renovated in such a way that it changes its historic look. The house was built in 1908 and has household items dating further back. Some appliances date from the early 1950s.

Leta May died in 1974 at age 91. Clareta died when she was 95 in 1981.

Recently, friends Norma Wilcox of Thorp and Web Stovall of Prosser toured the farm house. Wilcox remarked often about old furniture and woodwork that she remembered seeing in her grandmother’s home.

One of the goals of the park is to preserve and showcase the Kittitas Valley’s pioneer and agricultural heritage, to remind people of the state and nation’s farm foundations.