Woman wants to commemorate a neighborhood long gone

Welcome to Emander. It no longer exists, but a woman who attended the old Emander School at what’s now I-5 and 128th Street in south Everett hopes to commemorate the place where she grew up.

“We would like a plaque or ‘Welcome to Emander’ sign, or a kiosk somewhere at Mariner High School, Voyager Middle School or on the Interburan Trail,” said Pat Veale, 73, who now lives near Clearview with her husband, John Veale.

Her name was Patty Short when she started first grade in 1951 in the one-room Emander schoolhouse. Three of her six siblings — older brothers Denny, Tom and Bill Short — also went to Emander School.

What’s now Fourth Avenue W, the north-south arterial alongside Mariner High, was once Emander Road.

“Businesses ate it up,” Veale said. Her parents sold their 5-acre Emander property and moved to Granite Falls during her eighth-grade year at Olympic View Junior High. By then, Emander School was closed and she had attended the Mukilteo district’s Wilson Elementary School, now gone, and Fairmount Elementary School near what was then Paine Air Force Base.

Her parents, Orville and Edna Short, sold their land to a California developer for $10,000 in 1958, nearly a decade before I-5 opened in Everett in the mid-1960s.

Their land was just south of where the Mukilteo district would build Mariner High School in 1970. The future Mariner site was “a big rolling hill with a little white farmhouse, and a creek that went east and west,” Veale said.

Bill Short, 74, remembers his dad using dynamite to blow up stumps from the firs that were once there. They had a couple of cows on their “stump farm,” he said. Veale, remembering the “hobby farm,” said her dad also worked in construction.

A list of former and current Snohomish County school districts, on the League of Snohomish County Heritage Organizations website, shows the Emander district was established in 1919. It was consolidated with the Mukilteo School District in 1945, “which is probably the reason we now serve the south Everett area,” said Andy Muntz, spokesman for the Mukilteo district.

Emander School, Muntz said, “was apparently located in what are now the southbound lanes of I-5, just north of 128th Street.”

Veale will never forget that schoolhouse, which after it closed became the Emander Community Club. It was later moved to property owned by Edna and Pete DeYoung just east of I-5. The old school building was torn down in the late 1990s. In its place today are storage units just west of McCollum Park.

“It was a square white building,” said Veale, who recalls climbing about 10 steps to enter the school’s double doors. There was a coat closet, old-fashioned desks hooked together in two rows, and blackboards on two walls. “For lunch we’d go down in the basement. There was an old furnace,” she said.

Her brother Bill remembers it well. “It was a coal furnace,” said Short, who lives with his wife, Ruthie, near Granite Falls. After a custodian got a fire going each morning, he said, “the big boys in second grade would go downstairs and shovel coal into the furnace.”

Veale said that recess included a bit of primary-grade bullying. “The second-grade girls would run out and get on the swing and wouldn’t let us first-graders swing,” she said.

And that name, Emander? It’s not a family name, but was concocted from the pronunciation of initials. According to the Washington Trails Association, land that’s now McCollum Park on 128th east of I-5 was owned years ago by the Merrill & Ring Lumber Co. In what the website calls “a twist of folksy creativity,” the neighborhood took the company’s “M” and “R” to become Emander.

Everett historian Jack O’Donnell said that retired Everett Public Library history specialist David Dilgard has vouched for that origination of the name.

A community group, the Pioneers of Emander, championed the park’s creation. McCollum Park, about a half-mile east of I-5 on 128th, is a former gravel pit. Later, from about 1947 to 1967, it was used by Snohomish County as the Emander Landfill, a refuse dump.

Before Everett-to-Seattle interurban rail service ended in 1939, there was a trolley stop at Emander. It was about seven miles south of the interurban depot in downtown Everett.

Talking with people from the Mukilteo School District and the Everett Public Library, Veale has learned a bit about Emander School’s history, but she doesn’t have a picture of her old schoolhouse. She hopes to find an image that could be used to commemorate the school.

With all the traffic, apartments, fast-food places, hotels and other businesses, Veale hardly recognizes the area. “I only recognize the telephone pole that was on Mom and Dad’s property. The condo there has the same driveway we had,” she said.

“My brothers and I, that’s our childhood,” Veale said.

Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460; jmuhlstein@herald net.com.

Emander School

Pat Veale hopes to find pictures of the old Emander School, at what’s now I-5 and 128th Street in south Everett. If you have memories or photos of the schoolhouse, contact Julie Muhlstein at 425-339-3460 or email: jmuhlstein@heraldnet.com.