Hewitt and Lee

Eastside Stories: Twin Valley Dairy

Article by Carla Trsek

Eastside Stories is our way of sharing Eastside history through the many events, people places and interesting bits of information that we collect at the Eastside Heritage Center. We hope you enjoy these stories and share them with friends and famil…

Eastside Stories is our way of sharing Eastside history through the many events, people places and interesting bits of information that we collect at the Eastside Heritage Center. We hope you enjoy these stories and share them with friends and family.

Kelsey Creek Farm is a very popular city park in Bellevue, but its agricultural story goes back several decades before Bellevue incorporated. The land was first farmed by the Duey family in the 1920s and 1930s. William Duey worked on a farm in Skagit Valley, but when he heard about land available for rent in what is now Bellevue, he moved with his wife and three children in 1921 to start their own dairy.

The land belonged to the Haller family, a Seattle family with extensive Eastside land holdings. In addition to the land that became Kelsey Creek Farm, the wealthy family also owned the land that became the Glendale Golf Course along the park’s northern border.

The Duey’s first barn before the 1933 fire. Note the angled roofs. Photo courtesy City of Bellevue.

The Duey’s first barn before the 1933 fire. Note the angled roofs. Photo courtesy City of Bellevue.

It was far from ideal farmland. Most of the property was either covered with stumps or soaked in wetlands. The stumps came from the Hewitt-Lea Lumber Company, which had logged the site around the turn of the century. Additionally, no roads connected the farm to the small town of Bellevue. The only access to the property was a railroad bed with the ties still in place. It had only gone out of service two years before the Duey family moved in.

William and Pearl Duey and their three children, Fernley, Alta, and William Jr., quickly got to work pulling out stumps, building a house, building a barn and establishing a herd of dairy cows. They milked the cows twice a day and delivered milk, cream, and butter to customers once a day. They named their farm Twin Valley Dairy in honor of the two valleys that parallel either side of the barns.

The Duey’s second barn after the 1933 fire. Note the rounded roof. This barn still stands at Kelsey Creek Farm and houses the park’s resident animals. Photo courtesy City of Bellevue.

The Duey’s second barn after the 1933 fire. Note the rounded roof. This barn still stands at Kelsey Creek Farm and houses the park’s resident animals. Photo courtesy City of Bellevue.

The Twin Valley Dairy provided a good life for their family but they were not always financially secure. Especially during the 1930s when people who couldn’t pay for their milk in cash, they would offer services or products from their own farms in return. Additionally, the logging operation that preceded the farm and bedeviled the Dueys as they pulled out stump after stump at least provided the family with a second source of income. There was so much downed cedar on the property left over from the logging operation that Mr. Duey cut and sold cedar fence posts.

The heart of the dairy were the cows. The herd was made of a mix of dairy breeds common during the period, including Brown Swiss, Guernsey, and Jersey. They kept about thirty milking cows, but the total bovine population rose and fell with the births and sales of calves. The cows lived year-round in the pastures, although they probably were taken into the barn for milking and possibly for calving. In a small barn just south of the main barn, milk was bottled and cream and butter were made.

In 1933, the barn and 90 tons of hay stored in its hay loft burned to the ground. The Duey’s youngest son Fernley remembered that “the whole hillside was afire. It was a mess. We had to milk the cows and tie them to a fence for several days until another barn could be built.” That new barn was built amazingly quickly. Neighbors and hired hands put up the structure in just a few weeks. The Duey’s continued to provide milk, cream, and butter to Eastside customers through the end of the decade.

William and Pearl Duey in front of their milk truck, c. 1930s. Photo courtesy City of Bellevue.

William and Pearl Duey in front of their milk truck, c. 1930s. Photo courtesy City of Bellevue.

At the beginning of World War II, the Duey family moved off the property and the Haller family sold it to a man named John Michael. The Duey family sold him their business, including their cows. Michael expanded the dairy herd and built a larger barn to the north of the Duey’s barn with material purchased from Dunn Lumber in Seattle.

All three barns are protected as part of the city’s park. The small milk barn is now painted red and serves as offices for the site’s staff. The Duey’s big barn is now painted white and houses the park’s resident farm animals and Michael’s larger white barn serves as classrooms and offices. In a city now dominated by growing business interests, Kelsey Creek Farm provides a tangible connection to Bellevue’s agricultural history.

References:

Harvey, David W. “Historical Analysis of Kelsey Creek Community Park Barns Bellevue, Washington.” For Kovalenko Architects and City of Bellevue Parks and Recreation Department. October 1991.

Jones and Jones. “Kelsey Creek Community Park Renovation Plan.” City of Bellevue Department of Parks and Recreation. June 1993.

McDonald, Lucile. “Kelsey Creek Park land still being farmed.” Journal American. April 23, 1979.


Our Mission To steward Eastside history by actively collecting, preserving, and interpreting documents and artifacts, and by promoting public involvement in and appreciation of this heritage through educational programming and community outreach.

Our Vision To be the leading organization that enhances community identity through the preservation and stewardship of the Eastside’s history.

Eastside Stories: Logging the Eastside

No. 2 | February 20, 2019

Eastside Stories

Subscribe to Eastside Stories by emailing us at: info@eastsideheritagecenter.org

Eastside Stories is our way of sharing Eastside history through the many events, people places and interesting bits of information that we collect at the Eastside Heritage Center. We hope you enjoy these stories and share them with friends and famil…

Eastside Stories is our way of sharing Eastside history through the many events, people places and interesting bits of information that we collect at the Eastside Heritage Center. We hope you enjoy these stories and share them with friends and family.

Welcome to Eastside Stories, a new series from the Eastside Heritage Center. Through these periodic postings we will bring Eastside History to life and highlight the people, places, and events that have shaped its remarkable evolution.

Logging the Eastside

When the first intrepid settlers made their way to the Eastside in the 1860s, mostly what they found were trees. Really big trees.

As with so many things in life, this presented both a problem and an opportunity. The problem was that most settlers wanted to do what most Americans did at that time: farm. The Homestead Act of 1862 made land pretty much free for the grabbing, and as the area around the town of Seattle got carved up, settlers headed across and around Lake Washington to stake their claims and start farming. But there were those trees—up to 150 feet tall and several feet across.

The opportunity was to turn those trees into dollars.

 
A crew from the Siler Logging Co. in Redmond cut a large cedar tree. The loggers on the upper left and right are standing on spring boards.(OR/L 79.79.044)

A crew from the Siler Logging Co. in Redmond cut a large cedar tree. The loggers on the upper left and right are standing on spring boards.

(OR/L 79.79.044)

The Puget Sound area had its start as timber country. The first commercial transaction in the new metropolis of Seattle (the Denny Party huddled in a cabin on Alki Point) consisted of the sale of a load of logs to a schooner captain for use as pilings in San Francisco Bay. The rapid growth of San Francisco after the Gold Rush provided a ready market for lumber, shingles, and pilings.

Getting those enormous logs to mills and ships presented a challenge. Water was the answer, and the timber cutters made their way along the many miles of shoreline on Puget Sound, gradually working their way inland. But since Lake Washington still lacked a good connection to Puget Sound, getting Eastside logs to mills was impossible at first. So the earliest Eastside settlers clearing their farms often had no choice but to burn the logs.

 
A locomotive belonging to the Hewitt and Lee logging company in Bellevue hauls a load of logs. (2002.147.004)

A locomotive belonging to the Hewitt and Lee logging company in Bellevue hauls a load of logs. (2002.147.004)

Three important changes, beginning in the 1880s, made Eastside logging profitable. First, mills began to spring up along Lake Washington, and then gradually inland. It would always make more sense to ship higher value lumber and shingles than to transport logs, so mills followed the loggers inland. A number of the largest mills were around Lake Sammamish, which was served by early rail lines.

Second, transportation improved. In 1885 a log sluice opened in Montlake, between Lake Washington and Portage Bay. This ditch had a gate at the upper end (Lake Washington was about nine feet higher than Portage Bay at that time) which was opened to let rushing water carry logs to the mills along Lake Union. Railroads began to extend across the Eastside in the 1880s, allowing easier shipping of logs and lumber.

 
Employees at Webber's Shingle Mill on Lake Sammamish. (OR/L 79.79.049)

Employees at Webber's Shingle Mill on Lake Sammamish. (OR/L 79.79.049)

Third, mechanization began to take over. Steam powered donkey engines pulled logs from hillsides and gullies using steel cables known as “wire rope.” Hand saws and axes were replaced with mechanized harvesting equipment. Trucks replaced horses and oxen.

By the 1920s, most of the Eastside had been logged off. Remaining smaller trees that were not worth cutting for timber, and are often seen standing alone in photos of the period, were taken for pulp. As timber was cut and stumps removed, farms spread across the Eastside. Aerial photos from the 1930s show few heavily wooded areas, with most of the Eastside taken up by farms and sparse second-growth forests. 

Today, a sharp-eyed observer can see evidence of early logging. Western Red Cedar rots very slowly, and original stumps can be found in second growth forests around the Eastside. On the sides of many of these stumps, notches for springboards—platforms that allowed loggers to cut above the fat base of the tree--can still be seen. 

Looking at the mature residential areas and dense second growth forests of the Eastside, it can be hard to imagine that 100 years ago most of the Eastside was quite barren. Fortunately those big trees have a way of growing back to provide us with beauty, shade and oxygen.


Our Mission To steward Eastside history by actively collecting, preserving, and interpreting documents and artifacts, and by promoting public involvement in and appreciation of this heritage through educational programming and community outreach.

Our Vision To be the leading organization that enhances community identity through the preservation and stewardship of the Eastside’s history.


Eastside Heritage Center is supported by 4 Culture

Eastside Heritage Center is supported by 4 Culture