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Skagit River Journal

of History & Folklore
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Covers from British Columbia to Puget sound. Counties covered:
Skagit, Whatcom, Island, San Juan. An evolving history dedicated
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Noel V. Bourasaw, editor

810 Central Ave., Sedro-Woolley, Washington, 98284
Home of the Tarheel Stomp

Mortimer Cook slept here & named the town Bug

Magnus Anderson, 1869 Fir island pioneer,
his famous cabin and
the history of the town of Fir

By Noel V. Bourasaw, Skagit River Journal

Magnus Anderson family home near Fir. Photo courtesy of Sebring's Skagit County Illustrated magazine, December 1902

Those who see Magnus Anderson's cabin near the old bank that now serves as LaConner's town hall may not realize all it represents. It is our oldest connection with the time when much of the land in the triangle formed by Skagit bay on the west and the forks of the Skagit was under water for many months of the year and men broke their backs to dike their farmland.
Born in Norway in 1836, Anderson learned carpentry while very young and signed on as a ship's carpenter on a Norwegian freighter that sailed back and forth to the Americas. In those days before the Panama canal, people who wanted to reach the west coast of the United States had to choose between sailing for months around the Horn of South America or trekking across the isthmus of Panama, then part of Colombia. On one of his voyages during the early years of the U.S. Civil War, Anderson decided to leave his ship and slog through the jungles and rivers of the isthmus. When he reached the West Coast, he took passage on a schooner to San Francisco, where he signed up as a ship carpenter on a U.S. transport for the duration of the Civil War.
He became naturalized as a U.S. citizen just in time to cast his first vote for Abraham Lincoln for the president's reelection. In 1868 he left his ship again at Port Townsend, then the main customs port in Washington territory, to work as a carpenter at the large Port Blakely shipyard. Over the next year, he heard from loggers about the mill at Utsalady near Skagit bay and he decided to explore the delta of the Skagit river in the summer of 1869. According to the late historian John Conrad, who knew Anderson well, on July 16, 1869, Anderson took up a preemption claim on the North fork of the river at the south end of Pleasant Ridge:
"Like Michael Sullivan and Samuel Calhoun, the first delta settlers," Conrad wrote, "he was drawn to Pleasant Ridge, the low hill that rose above the swampy marsh of what would become known as Fir island. He built a cabin that first year on the southern edge of the ridge, overlooking the North fork of the river." Conrad recalled that in 1950, Mrs. Elizabeth Miller, who then owned Anderson's original acreage, donated his 1869 cabin to LaConner's Pioneer Park by the bridge. We learn from the 1906 book, Illustrated History of Skagit and Snohomish Counties [hereafter 1906 Book], that "The first house to be built in the Skagit valley was erected in 1863 on the claim of W.H. Sartwell, now owned by Magnus Anderson, about five miles below Mount Vernon." That would have been someplace between the future location of the towns of Fir and Skagit City. We have not discovered where Anderson himself lived in that first year or so and we do not know if the cabin was in the same location when Mrs. Miller donated it, or whether it had been moved once before. We hope that a reader will know.

Scandinavian immigrants move to the Skagit

A crew gathers around a threshing machine while harvesting at the J.O. Rudene and Magnus Anderson farms around the turn of the century.

A fellow ship carpenter from Blakely, a Finn named Charles Tollber [also sometimes spelled Tolber], followed Anderson to the Skagit, took a claim on the North fork, soon sold it and bought other land nearby. Tollber married Anderson's sister later when she moved out here and Tollber started the ferry across the North fork that was eventually replaced by a bridge. Anderson and Tollber were the only permanent Scandinavian settlers in that area at the time, but that soon changed. C.J. Chilberg seems to have been the next to travel here, sometime in 1869-70. Perry and Paul Polson, C.J. Chilberg and his brother Joseph emigrated from Sweden to Chillicothe, Iowa, and in 1869 they took the Union Pacific to San Francisco, then took a steamer to Portland. After crossing the Columbia river, they all walked to Olympia and then took steamboats to Skagit bay. C.J. Chilberg settled on the Beaver Marsh and built a cabin on Pleasant Ridge near Anderson. Later he returned to Chillicothe in 1871 to move his wife and family out to his homestead. Another Swedish immigrant, Mathilda Andersdotter, visited the Chilbergs here in 1873, was courted by Anderson and soon married him. Mathilda's family emigrated to Chillicothe in 1868. Mathilda's brother, John Anderson, moved his family to the Skagit in 1874 and brought with them their orphaned nephew from Sweden, Charles Conrad, John's father. The 1906 Book notes that the area attracted many other settlers during those early years: "Among the first settlers on the north fork: John Guinea, William Hayes, William Houghton, Joseph Maddox, William Brown, H. A. Wright, Peter Vander Kuyl [and] Franklyn Buck."
Anderson's skills at carpentry were valuable to other settlers as well, as were his tools, which were rare on the frontier. He made his living largely by building cabins for his neighbors such as Olaf Polson, who moved his family, including seven other children, out from Chillicothe to join his sons in 1871. In Charles Dwelley's book, Skagit Memories, Olaf's son Alfred recalled that his father employed Anderson to build an actual house to replace their original cabin in 1874. "Magnus Anderson, the builder, was a shipbuilder and cabinetmaker and a complete set of tools," Alfred wrote. "Among them was a four-foot plane with a rope attached to the front. It was operated by two men, one pulling and the other pushing."

Andersons move to Mann's Landing, which became Fir In 1878, Magnus and Mathilda moved down to a farm they bought near the South fork of the Skagit about four miles from his original claim and about a mile north of Charles H. Mann's place. W.H. Sartwell, who was mentioned above, preceded Anderson down to the South Fork. We know that Sartwell settled there before 1870 because Northern Pacific route engineer D.C. Linsley and Frank Wilkeson recorded his name in the diaries of their 1870 Skagit river exploration, noting that he lived four miles above the mouth of the river. There was a small village called Mann's Landing three and a half miles from the mouth of the river on the west shore where steamboats stopped to pick up cordwood for their boilers and deliver mail and products from Seattle. Mann originally filed a claim and built a store on in 1876. The 1906 Book lists the early settlers around there as: "Joseph Lisk, William Kayton, George Wilson, John Wilbur, E. McAlpine, L. Sweet, A. G. Kelley, R. I. Kelley and Joseph Wilson." On another page, Kayton's name is spelled Caton. There he is listed along with Joe Lisk, James Abbott and Wilbur, as having homesteads north of where the town of Conway would later form, listed in the order they lay toward Mount Vernon. They were all four "squaw men," so called because they took Indian wives in those days when there were few Caucasian women on the frontier.
Olaf Polson, the father of the Polson brothers, also moved there about the same time that Anderson did, as did Vander Kuyl and Tollber and Tom Hastie, who moved there from Whidbey Island. According to the book, Chechacos All, others who settled there early on included Samuel S. Tingley, Thomas R. Jones, T.J. Rawlins and Samuel, Edward and Henry Summers. The book mysteriously did not list Thomas Hayton in the group of settlers on the west side of the river even though he was one of the most important settlers five miles west of Mann's Landing in 1876. Descendants from an old Kentucky family whose descendants landed in Rhode Island in the 1630s, he and his sons did subscribe for biographies in the back of the book. Mamie Johnson Moen, a local historian and genealogist wrote in her Fir history in the 1960s that the Haytons, although English, provided a haven on their ranch for the young Scandinavian boys who flocked to the area to join Anderson, Polson and the Chilbergs.
The population on Mann's side grew quickly as logging camps dotted the area and the timber trade led to the establishment of an actual town at the Landing, with a hotel built by Mann. Chechacos shared a story about how the town soon took the name of Fir: "Mrs. Mann, standing on the east bank, was thinking about a name for their post office across the river when her eye fell on a tall fir tree. Others agreed on a change of name, so Mann's Landing became Fir in 1880." The post office opened on April 6 that year. The book notes that the town was lively industrious and soon had several stores, hotels and saloons, plus a meat market operated by Ole Olson and located on a river float. A Mr. Sullivan opened a blacksmith shop and an actual ferry replaced a scow that crossed the river.
Magnus Anderson became a businessman himself in 1882, according to the 1906 Book, when he replaced Mann's crude lodgings with a handsome new hotel in 1882, which was managed by Charles Villeneuve Sr. Moen shared a little-known fact. Magnus Anderson built his hotel just north of Mann's store and his brother-in-law John Anderson, built another one just south of the store. In 1884, Magnus paid for the first liquor license in Fir for a saloon in his hotel. Frank Carrin soon received another for his Morling House, apparently the third hotel in town. A fire on April 10, 1885, leveled the hotels and other buildings in Fir, but Magnus quickly rebuilt his. An 1893 fire again destroys all of Mann's original buildings and by then Fir had faded in importance because of Mount Vernon, five years upriver. The Lutheran church is the only building that still stands on the site. Back in 1884, Anderson was a member of the team that cleared the jams that formed near the mouth of the Skagit. The two jams that had blocked the Skagit at Mount Vernon for more than 80 years were cleared, starting in 1878, but the loose logs from the jams plus the trees unearthed in subsequent floods choked the mouth of the river. Not only did they limit the trips of steamboats from Seattle, but the snags just under the water ripped holes in the sternwheelers more than once. Our excerpts of the first issue of the Skagit News of Mount Vernon [see website: http://www.stumpranchonline.com/skagitjournal/SkagitCtyRiv/Library/County/SNews188403-4.html] describes that log-clearing work:

Mr. [Charles] Harmon's crew at work clearing logs in main channel [South fork, the lower of two jams] of Skagit, took out 2.5 million feet of logs last 2 months. The loads are run down Deep Water slough on a boom to Skagit bay, then by steamer Bob Irving to the mill at Utsalady on Camano island.

Anderson moves business as Conway rises on the east shore

Two Lutheran churches once stood where one remains on the Fir Island road, west of the bridge over the South fork of the Skagit river. Photo courtesy of the book, Skagit Settlers, which is still for sale at the LaConner Museum.

As we noted above, the buildings at Fir were destroyed in a bad 1893 fire. Instead of rebuilding at Fir this time, Anderson decided to be a storekeeper across the river and bought Charles Villeneuve Sr.'s store in Conway in 1895, during the mid-1890s nationwide Depression. Conway was a relatively new town on the east side of the river from Fir, and had featured only one store in the 1880s. That all changed when James J. Hill's Great Northern Railroad chose a route along the east side and laid tracks in 1891. Charles Villeneuve was the first permanent settler on that side after moving from French Canada in 1872. He initially bought land for a home on a small island in the river that was later spanned by the bridge trestle. Thomas P. Jones, who emigrated to the U.S. from Conway, Wales, in 1859, soon joined him. In 1874, Jones bought 120 acres of valley bottomland between what is now Hwy 99 and the river and included the site of the future town of Conway.
Starting in 1888, Villeneuve was the first operator of the new Lafayette ferry a mile north of Fir and he established a home and a small store at the east landing, that first store we mentioned. When Great Northern built a depot on the east side on Jones's land, Villeneuve bought four lots in the town that Jones platted on his property and named for his hometown in Wales. Villeneuve invested in the original town of Woolley by building the Hotel Royal during the nationwide Depression and leased his Conway store to William Bonser. A severe flood in 1894 almost wiped out the new town and Bonser couldn't make a go of the store, so that is when Magnus Anderson stepped in. As the settlers flocked into the Skagit delta flats around the river and Conway and its depot became a center for trade, Anderson's store flourished and the town of Fir on the west shore began to wane.
Anderson also took over the postmaster job from Villeneuve, who had established the Conway post office in 1893. Villeneuve had begun investing in old Woolley, where he built the Hotel Royal. Before the turn of the century, Magnus sold out his store interest to F.C. Anderson. John Melkid, who married Magnus's daughter Alice, bought the store in 1902, so it returned to the family. Magnus Anderson died in 1925 at age 89, a widower after the death of Mathilda, age 74, in 1913. We hope that a family member or anyone else will fill in the gaps of the lives of the Andersons and send us a scan or copy of the documents, articles or photos of families, towns and stores in this story, or correct any errors in our story or the original sources.
[Ed. note: see both the Free Home Pages and our Subscriber Edition archives for more stories about Fir, Conway and the North fork and South fork of the Skagit river. Or enter the subject name into the search box below to find what you are most interested in.]

Story posted on March 5, 2004
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Skagit River Journal

Magnus Anderson, 1869 Fir island pioneer, his famous cabin and the history of the town of Fir

Magnus Anderson, 1869 Fir island pioneer,
his famous cabin and
the history of the town of Fir