SNOHOMISH — A piece of the Harvey family heritage is gone.
The dilapidated white house that stood at the south end of Harvey Airfield since the early 1900s was torn down the last week of August.
Warner Blake, of the Snohomish Historical Society, said he tried to help owner Kandace Harvey find a way to preserve the home before she decided to bulldoze it.
“It’s sad that there was no attention paid to it,” Blake said. “She could have told a wonderful story about the Harvey family.”
However, Harvey said she couldn’t get permission from Snohomish County to move and remodel the house. She had safety concerns about the building because it was tilting to one side.
“It was in disarray,” she said.
The Harvey house was built around 1907 by Noble Harvey, son of John Harvey, who homesteaded the property in 1859.
John Harvey built the original family home along the Snohomish River east of the Seattle-Snohomish Mill. After a fire at the mill destroyed one of the family’s dairy barns, Noble Harvey decided to build a new house and barn on another part of the property.
He designed the house to be used as a barn after his family lived in it temporarily while a new, nicer home was built nearby. That house stood at the airfield until 2000 when it was hit by a plane and burned down. The pilots were OK but the house, now the home of Kandace Harvey, had to be rebuilt.
The white house next door was never used as a barn. Noble’s son, Eldon Harvey, and his wife, Marjorie, raised their three children in it.
“I remember I always had to work because I was the oldest,” said their daughter, Donna Harvey, now 79. “I was driving a tractor at 9 years old.”
During the late 1930s and early 1940s Eldon Harvey cleared farmland to grow peas, broccoli, corn and hay, and to rasie white-faced Hereford cattle.
In 1944, Eldon and Noble Harvey started the airfield with Wesley Loback, a pilot who had returned from flying in World War II. The business went bankrupt and had to be restarted before becoming a success.
Eldon and Marjorie and their children, Donna, Marilyn and Richard, ran the airfield, a flight school and a restaurant until the early 1970s.
“We did everything,” Donna Harvey said, noting she learned to fly at age 17. “It was a lot of work.”
Richard “Dick” Harvey took over the business and ran it with his wife, Kandace, until he died in 1995 after a long battle with leukemia. Kandace and their children, Lance, Heather, Tyson, and Preston, now manage the airfield and the businesses in it.
Donna Harvey said she understood why Kandace decided to tear down her childhood home. It sat empty for more than half a century and hadn’t been cared for over the years.
“But I didn’t want to see it go,” she said. “There were a lot of memories there.”
Amy Nile: 425-339-3192; anile@heraldnet.com. Twitter: @AmyNileReports
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