Silver Lake in south Everett is surrounded by homes, a park, restaurants and apartments.
In the past, things were a little more rugged.
Lloyd Larson of Everett remembers going to a horseracing track next to the lake when he was a little tyke.
“I remember being there with my sister,” said Larson, 84. “A guy got my mother in a shell game.”
What fun to learn what used to be in our neighborhoods.
The Larson family could ride the Interurban trolley line to the racetrack for a dime.
Born and raised in Everett, Larson’s father was a logger and fisherman. Larson said “pretty near” all the men in those days worked in the woods or on boats.
In 1935-36 he was in the Civilian Conservation Corps, where young folks were turned into productive men and women, military-style, building logging roads and planting trees with the U.S. Forest Service.
“It made a man out of me,” Larson said. “You bet.”
He then logged in this area and married. The union that produced two sons survived pretty well. Lloyd and Pearl Larson have been married for 62 years.
When Larson left the woods, he worked for laundry companies and built more than a dozen homes and apartments around Everett. He lives in just such a duplex near Everett High School.
“I’ve had a great life,” Larson said. “I have a great wife.”
To get the scoop on logging around Silver Lake, I checked in with Everett library historian David Dilgard. He said Pope &Talbot’s Puget Mill Co. owned holdings west of Silver Lake.
“Silver Lake was right in the middle of a patchwork of wooded tracts owned by a variety of companies and individuals,” Dilgard said. “Because of the inland location, it appears that logging activity began a little later than places with direct access to the river or sound.”
One of the things Larson shared with me was an amazing picture – taken by no-less-than-famous photographer Darius Kinsey – of a logger way, way up on top of a pole.
The Kinsey pictureshows some impressive spar trees.
“Loggers strategically located and carefully selected the spar tree, which had the main cable line and the haul-back cables rigged to it,” Dilgard said. “This picture was taken of what old-timers called a ‘high lead show,’ where the logs were swung up off steep or rough terrain instead of dragging them over the ground.”
Dilgard said you needed a tall spar tree to do that, as the Kinsey picture shows.
Kinsey and his wife, Tabitha, took photographs around logging camps. More Kinsey photographs can be viewed on the Internet.
It is estimated that to get some of the photographs that he did, he was carrying in excess of 100 pounds of equipment around the country on a horse and buggy or pack mules.
Kinsey used to turn up at various towns and villages, pitch his tent and advertise that he was in town. He would take portraits for a couple of days then move on to the next town. Loggers paid 50 cents per picture. Kinsey continued to take pictures until 1940 when he was injured falling off a tree stump. He died in 1945.
I wonder if he took a picture of the big water slide that used to be at the south end of Silver Lake.
“That’s what’s most vivid in the memories of early residents – the big water slide,” Dilgard said. “There were old fairgrounds with the race track and baseball field west of the lake, the Bungalow Inn with its huge dance floor on the north edge of the lake and, of course, the beach park.”
Dilgard said the old racetrack Larson remembers was part of the fairgrounds or “stock show” grounds. Stock Show Road, now 112th Street SE, used to run along the north side of the fairgrounds.
“This was originally the North Pacific Fair &Livestock Exhibition, although they sometimes called the site the Silver Lake Show Grounds,” Dilgard said. “It opened Aug. 25, 1926. They had horse races, chariot races, and it operated into the 1950s.”
When Larson has coffee with cronies, chatter often drifts to the old days of Everett. I’d like to thank Larson for letting us in on a bit of the conversation.
Columnist Kristi O’Harran: 425-339-3451 or oharran@heraldnet.com.
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