It’s amazing to learn more about Lewis County history after traveling six hours across Washington state to Walla Walla.
Sandra Crowell, author of “The Land Called Lewis,” and I left Thursday for the Women Writing the West conference. At the Marcus Whitman Hotel and Conference Center, we met a 1953 graduate of Chehalis High School whose father served as a Chehalis police court judge. Then another woman whose ancestors bought land outside Toledo in 1886 introduced herself to us.
What a treat to meet award-winning writer Evelyn Searle Hess, who told me her father — James Dorman Searle — also served as a Toledo city attorney. The Chehalis Municipal Court judge, a Missouri native who lived in Montana before settling in Lewis County in 1932, handled about 500 cases a year until retiring in 1971. He served as president of the Lewis County Rose Society and the Chehalis Kiwanis Club. In 1961, he won the grand sweepstakes honor and award for best full-bloom rose at the Portland Rose Society’s Fall Rose Show. He and his wife, Amy, had three daughters, including Evelyn.
Hess, who left Chehalis to attend the University of Washington, married David Alan at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Chehalis in September 1958. She studied journalism and landscape architecture at the University of Oregon and horticulture at Oregon State University. Hess, the mother of two grown children with grandchildren and now great-grandchildren, co-taught a conference workshop on nature writing. Her book, “To the Woods,” which chronicled the 15 years she and her husband camped on their 20 acres in foothills of the Oregon Coast Range, won the 2011 Willa Award for creative nonfiction. In 2015, OSU Press published her second book, “Building a Better Nest,” about establishing a sustainable life. She lives south of Eugene in Lorane, Oregon.
Susie Anderson Drougas, an author and court reporter in Eastern Washington, told me about her family’s historic home on Evans Road outside Toledo. She has written the Dusty Rose Western adventure and suspense series, including “Pack Saddles & Gunpowder,” “The Blues,” and “High Hunt.”
Her ancestor, Jens Due, was born in Denmark in 1863 and immigrated to the United States in 1885. He lived a short time in Nebraska and Wyoming before settling in Tacoma in 1886. He purchased 160 acres of railroad land on Beaver Creek 10 miles east of Toledo for $2.50 per acre, but returned to Tacoma, where he married Danish immigrant Karen Lysdahn in 1888 and worked for the St. Paul Lumber Co., according to “The Toledo Community Story.” A decade later, he and Karen filled a two-wheeled cart pulled by an old horse with their tools, food, and bedding and traveled four days south to his land outside Toledo. They sawed and split cedar trees for a small shack and later erected a log cabin with a cobblestone fireplace and filled cracks in the cabin walls with moss and clay.
“They returned to Tacoma that same year and traded the horse for two Holstein heifers, packing their belongings on the heifers with the men walking,” Karen Due wrote for the book’s 1952 edition. “Everything went fine until they got to Yelm, where one of the heifers broke away from them, ran through a wire fence and cut herself pretty bad. After they cornered her and got their pots and pans together, they had to stop at a drugstore to get a needle and linen thread to sew her face up so she could see again.”
Two years later, in 1900, the couple with their five children — Vego, Einar, Harry, Esther and Elmer— made their final trek from Tacoma to Toledo, this time in a covered wagon pulled by a team of ponies. They picked up groceries and their mail at the Windom post office and general store operated by J.T. Workman. Twice a week, Karen Due said, the mail was brought by horseback from the Knab post office on Layton Prairie.
Jens Due worked at a shingle bolt camp near Wilson four miles from their home and later at a shingle bolt camp on Beaver Creek closer to their home. The bolts were floated from Beaver Creek to Salmon Creek.
The Dues added a room to their cabin to house the teacher of a school a mile from their home and two more small bedrooms for their children. A photo in the history book shows the Due children at Salmon Creek School.
The family’s log cabin burned down in the early 1900s, but they built it again with lumber from Lester Omeg’s sawmill. They sold their home in 1911 and bought a place in the nearby Otter Creek district where they remained. Jens Due died in 1932; Karen in 1956.
Once again, I’m grateful for those early Toledo residents who captured the stories of their pioneer families before they were lost.
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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at chaptersoflife1999@gmail.com.
