Remembering Cottage Lake Back in the 1930's

– From a young boy's perspective

 [This is a continuation of the "Remembering Cottage Lake Back in the 1930's" article written for the January 15^, 2007 issue of the Cottage Lake Connection.  This follow-up article focuses more specifically on Joe Wilwerding's adventures as a boy on Cottage Lake in the 1930's.]

Joe Wilwerding

While doing research on the history of the Jurey-McCain House on the south end of Cottage Lake, I was able to locate and interview a descendant of Ezra Jurey who built this historic house in 1891.  The descendant is Joe Wilwerding, now semi-retired and living north of Houston, Texas. Joe's grandmother, Mary Slaughter, inherited the house from Ezra when he died in 1933 as Ezra had no children or direct descendants.  Mary used the house as a summer country home and her grandson, Joe Wilwerding, spent summers with her on Cottage Lake in the 1930's and 1940's. 

Joe loved the country life at Cottage Lake and said it was a great place for a boy to grow up.  He spent almost every weekend and every summer there until he was around 16 years old.  He also lived there with his grandmother for a full year when he was young and became very ill and almost died.  The clean country air, the healthy food and the love and care of his grandmother brought him back to health.    

The house, which been hand built by Ezra Jurey from timber harvested from the property, had electricity by the time they lived there but no indoor plumbing or telephone.  Outdoor plumbing consisted of a  "double-holer" (two seater) outhouse.  Joe remembered digging a new pit for the outhouse every year and with the help of others, moved it over the newly dug hole.   Fifty pound of powdered lime was put into the new hole to keep away the flies and odor.  During the middle of the night, they used porcelain bed pans (chamber pots) and one of his sisters was responsible for emptying them every morning. 

 Outhouse (no longer in use and left only for preserving history of house)

Ezra had a well dug when he originally built the house and this water was used for drinking and bathing.  The pump was located on the outside back porch and there were always a couple of drinking cups hanging from it.  Each time they pumped water they would always save some water to use for "priming the pump" the next time.  Joe said the well water had a wonderful taste.    

Saturday night was bath night.  Joe would have to pump the water and it would be heated on the wood stove.  His three sisters would bath first and since he was the dirtiest, he would bath last, reusing the same water.  He hated baths and they would often have to tie him down to get him to take one.

 Tuesday was laundry day and again he was responsible for pumping water from the well.  They would wash their clothes by hand, ring them out in a clothes wringer and then hang them up to dry outside on a clothes line.  Joe said there was nothing better smelling than clothes hung to dry in the fresh outdoors.

For heat, they had a pot furnace on the main living room but no heat upstairs where the bedrooms were.  It could get down into the 40's inside the house at night so they kept warm by using feather comforters that were 4" to 8" thick. 

Joe's grandmother, whom he called "Nana", was one of the kindest and most giving people Joe knew.  During the Depression years people helped each other out, were trusting and everyone got along with each other.  "Nana" would feed anyone that walked down their road looking for a handout and would let them work on the property for their food.

She would cook nonstop.   Every weekend, they would usually kill and cook three dozen chickens, butcher a small cow, and there were home baked goodies on the table all the time.  She baked and cooked on her wood burning stove.  Normally on Saturday or Sunday evenings they would have a couple dozen people over for dinner, always with somebody different.   

His grandmother raised on their property everything they ate including cows, pigs, chickens and turkey.  They had milk and eggs, and made butter and baked their own bread. Sometimes they even made their own soap from pig fat and lye.  She also had a vegetable garden and they were busy all the time plowing, planting, harvesting vegetables or tending to or slaughtering animals.

Joe said they only went to the store for staples such as sugar, lye and, of course, shot gun shells (.22 cartridges) for his rifle. They went to the store in Bothell every Saturday.  There was a big grain store there where they would load up their pickup truck and sometimes they took two vehicles.  They would also stop off at an IGA store near the church in Woodinville.

They had three horses too which they rode to get to the pastures as the land there was so boggy. Joe hunted deer, pheasant, quail and bull frogs for his grandmother. There were more frogs on Cottage Lake than you knew what to do with.  One day he caught 22 and his grandmother cooked them all.  She usually waited a couple of days before cooking them because she was afraid they might jump out of her frying pan. Joe would trap beaver, otter, and muskrat.  He would take the skins to the local tanner and get $2 apiece for them.   He also picked blackberries for his grandmother.  The blackberry brambles were often 15 feet high and 100 feet wide so he would use a method used by the Indians of taking his horse and dragging a ladder across the top of them.  Then he'd lie across the top of the ladder and pick the blackberries beneath it.  He said that he would always see small black bears in the woods eating blackberries.  One of the scariest times Joe can remember was when he encountered a mother black bear and her cub while he was picking blackberries with his ladder. The mother raised such a fuss that he left the ladder there, jumped on his horse and rode home.

Joe also loved fishing in Cottage Lake.  He caught yellow and striped bass, bluegills (lots of them), yellow bullheads (some people call them yellow-belly catfish), suckers (a form of white fish that live on the bottom of the lake and look like sturgeon with sucker mouths; he didn't like suckers.)  He said there was a few crappie and no cutthroat or rainbow trout because they came from the streams and didn't like the mud. 

Joe romanced his now wife for four years during high school and college at Cottage Lake.  He said he impressed her by taking her out to dig for worms* in the mud alongside Bear Creek and fish in his row boat for black bass and bull frogs. I guess Joe thought this was pretty romantic.
* [The worms were actually baby lamprey eels whose larvae resemble worms.  They breed in tributary streams and the fish just love to eat them; so they made great fishing bait.]  

Joe also told me about Georgie and Carl Bjornson.  This was an example of how kind and caring his grandmother was.  One day when Joe was about 12 years old (around the time of WWII,) Joe was out in the woods on his horse close to their property.  He saw two young men about 18 or 19 years old.  He spied on them for a while and then rode back home and told his grandmother about them.  She told Joe to go back and invite them over to have something to eat.  He rode back and did so.  In time, his grandmother, more or less, adopted them and let them live in the chicken coop, beside the main house.  In exchange, they helped her with some house maintenance, since her husband was no longer alive.  Before that time, she used the chicken coop to let anyone stay that was visiting or passing through.  Georgie and Carl had an interesting background as they were originally from Norway which was evidenced by their broken Norwegian accent.   From Norway, they took a boat to New York, then to San Francisco and then up to Seattle.  They somehow found their way to Cottage Lake.  Joe said Georgie was a brilliant mathematician and later became a top superintendent at Boeing.  After the war, his grandmother sold them some of her property that bordered the lake.

Carl Bjornson (upper left), Georgie Bjornson (upper right),
Sally Wilwerding (lower left) Joe Wilwerding (lower right)

Nana died in 1945 and the house and property were inherited by Joe's mother and two aunts.  By the late 1960's, they didn't get out to the lake much and Carl Bjornson was getting too old to keep the place up for them, so they decided to sell it. 

After I shared this interview with Matt and Mary McCain, who now own the house and property, they invited Joe and his sisters to come back for a visit to the house.  It had been decades since they had last seen it.   I had the pleasure of being there and seeing their excitement as they laid eyes on the old house and Cottage Lake.  Now, because of them we too can enjoy their memories and what it was like living on Cottage Lake over 70 years ago.