By Jeffrey Cunningham
President of the Magnolia Historical Society
October 13th, 2014
Then: Today it may be hard to imagine, but as little as one hundred years ago Magnolia was once a rural community. Seattle was settled in the 1850’s and at that time few hearty souls decided to make they way a little north and west of downtown to the peninsula of Magnolia. Dr. Henry Smith is the best known settler; he staked his claim down in the tide flat area now known as Smith Cove by the Magnolia Marina. A few people tried their luck at farming up on the bluff. In the first decades of the twentieth century new farms started popping up all the way from Salmon Bay in the north to Wolfe Creek in the south. In her work, Magnolia: Yesterday and Today (written in 1975 and published by the Magnolia Community Club, commemorating their 50th Anniversary), Aleua Frare dedicates a whole section to the dairy farms of central Magnolia in her chapter on agriculture. For the most part, farmers in Magnolia were just getting by from the food they could produce, with a little surplus going to the markets in Ballard, shipped by boat. According to Monica Wooton’s essay “A Dairyland of Sorts Back Then,”: “most early Magnolians literally scratched out a simple living with small crops and chickens.”
Perhaps one of the most memorable agricultural enterprises were the dairy farms that sprang up in Pleasant Valley, the central part of Magnolia between the east and west hills.
Pleasant Valley Farm was located where Albertson’s is today.
Another successful Magnolia farm serving the
dairy needs of Magnolia and Queen Anne customers.
Courtesy of Neil Smith.
Cows of many different farmers would roam where they wished and, as Frare recounts, they would all make it back to the right barn was time to be milked. This laxity would lead to some unfortunate circumstances, such as how in 1924, when the Wheeler Street Bridge burned down, a few doomed cows belonging to east Magnolia farmers were caught under the flaming beams. This bridge was replaced by the present Garfield Street Bridge, known colloquially as simply the Magnolia Bridge.
Now: The area that was primarily used as dairy land is now the area between modern day 32nd and 34th Avenues, from the Village all the way north to the locks. Pleasant Valley Dairy, owned by Esbern Hanson, was located at 2622 31st Ave. West. Frare points out that these barns are close to the current location of Albertson’s (which has not moved since her book’s publication in 1975). His cows roamed that area well into the 1930’s. Another interesting tidbit gleaned from Magnolia Yesterday and Today is that a butcher shop (name?) was in the location of Magnolia TV. Ironically, now that address hosts Billy Butcher. What goes around comes around.
