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Waschke Road

I’ve written before about how my grandfather, Gus Waschke, picked the property straddling the Deer and Silver Creek watersheds. He chose the land with his plans to farm in mind, but the property was inaccessible without going through Agnes’ father’s property on the Aldrich Road. That was okay to start out, but it didn’t square with Gus’ plans for the future. He wanted a county road.

The right-of-way

Fortunately, or maybe part of his plan, there was already a county right-of-way for a road on the west side of the property. From a newspaper clipping, I discovered that a petition was filed in with the Whatcom County Board of Commissioners (which eventually became the County Council) on December 18, 1886 for a right-of-way that eventually became Waschke Road. 1886 was probably before any Waschke had arrived in Whatcom County.

According to the clipping, the right-of-way was for a two-mile stretch, but it didn’t say which two-mile stretch. However, the length is right for a road on the section line from Axton Road to the point where the section line intersects Northwest Drive. This is only guess, but it also corresponds to what I remember hearing about the right-of-way. If my guess is correct, the right-of-way was a public trail, but not all the planned road was built.

The road

I’ve marked on the map the locations of the present Waschke Road, the piece that Gus built according to my father Ted, and where I think the original petition for the right of way was located. There may have been some sort of trail opened before 1900. In the 1950s, there was an wooden bridge over Deer Creek where the right-of-way would have been that was used for cattle and farm equipment. It had washed away by the early 1960s and was not repaired. The old bridge is the only indication that the northern end of the right-of-way was ever used.

The south section

The newspaper clipping suggests that the southern section of the road was built first. That may be true. The clipping mentions a shingle mill where a branch of Silver Creek crosses Waschke Road. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, cedar shingle mills were sprinkled all over the county and the first part of the road may have been built to service the shingle mill.

You can see a gap in the road from Larsen north to the Whatcom County Public Works garage. My guess is that the right-of-way from Larsen Road to the Smith Road was used, but never developed. The entrance to the the Whatcom County Public Works garage is now an extension south of Smith Road to Waschke Road, but that is a later addition. In the 1950s and 1960s, there was no road.

The Northwest Diagonal

Northwest Drive, first called The Northwest Diagonal, was one of the first roads north from Bellingham Bay to the Canadian Border. I suspect it dates from around the Fraser River Goldrush of 1853, which was also about the time Whatcom County was established. The Northwest was the main route to Ferndale before the highway (now I-5) was built. The route turned west at the Axton Road and threaded along Deer Creek and Barrett Lake and across the Nooksack at Ferndale. As I understand it, until Portal Way was built, the main road from Ferndale to Custer and Blaine was what is now Vista Drive.

Gus’s lane

Around 1916 when the Waschke Homestead farmhouse was built, Gus cleared a lane from the house to Waschke Road along the right-of-way. Gus did the work, but the county supplied a few wagon loads of gravel. Over time, the county took more responsibility, adding more gravel and grading several times a year. In the 1950s, the neighbors on the road paid the county to oil the road, cutting down the dust and potholes.

The skidroad

Gus’s lane crossed a skid road marked the southern boundary of the homestead. My father Ted remembered strings of logs pulled by oxen to the Nooksack on the greased skids. I don’t know the route taken to the river, but my grandmother Agnes told me that she covered my dad’s ears so he could not hear the ox skinners cursing at the oxen.

The newspaper clipping, written in the early 1970s says the original petition is stored at the Whatcom County Courthouse. I am planning a visit to the courthouse to find it, if it still exists. I may have something to add to this post when I have seen the original.

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Thrashing In a Bad Year

The marine climate of Whatcom County is mild compared to the Midwest, but it does not guarantee that every crop succeeds. This time of year, late September, my father, Ted, and my grandpa, Gus, worried about rain. A heavy thundershower or a few consecutive days of steady rain could destroy the grain crop, meaning less milk to ship to the dairy, fewer eggs from the chicken house to sell to the grocery stores, and the pigs would not fatten up the way Grandpa liked. A farmer who is not prepared to face a bad crop doesn’t last long on the farm.

Dad and Grandpa never complained about a bad year in my hearing, but I could see it on their faces. One year, probably mid 1950s, the oats were ready to harvest. It had been a good year: the oat heads were heavy and drooping. In those days, Dad and Grandpa grew a traditional mixture of oats and vetch.

Dad went out into the fields after breakfast to check on the oats. I went with him. The days had begun to shorten, the air was cool, and the morning dew was heavy, but the sun burned into the back of my neck. A stiff breeze rattled the dry stalks. Dad thrashed out a head or two of oats in his hand and bit down on a kernel to test its hardness, then spat out the hull. I copied him. He said the oats were ready to cut and we had better get back to the barn and grease the binder.

I know it was the fifties because it was one of the last years Dad used the binder and a thrashing machine. By 1960, he was using a combine and the binder was relegated to the back of the machinery shed until he finally hauled it off for scrap.

I helped Dad by handing him wrenches and the grease gun when he asked for them. By noon, the binder was lubricated, a sickle that Grandpa had sharpened while we greased was mounted, a fresh ball of twine was threaded into the knotter, and the canvas apron that carried the cut grain stalks into the binding mechanism was tight and ready to go. Mom had called a few neighbors on the telephone. They arrived, and we all went in to noon dinner. The bundles from the binder would sit in the field a day or two before the thrashing machine arrived. I seem to remember it was Sorenson’s outfit from Everson.

While the men were eating and drinking coffee, the clouds began to come in from the West, rain clouds coming through the Strait of Juan De Fuca and over Georgia Strait (now called the Salish Sea) from the Pacific where they had loaded up with moisture. Dad cut the back swathe, the first cut around the field in the reverse direction and right up to the fence.

I helped the men pick up the bundles as they came off the binder and set them upright and to the side in shocks, so Dad wouldn’t drive over them when he began cutting in the right direction. All the while, the clouds were darkening and piling up against the hills to the east.

As I remember, Dad cut the back swathe and two rounds before the thunder cracked and rain came down like the clouds were emptying buckets from the sky. The rain flattened the standing oats already bowing under the weight of heads fat with heavy grain. Within a minute, the binder was jammed up with the wet straw that wouldn’t feed, and Dad had to stop. All the crew could do was go home. A few went in to Ferndale to the Cedars Tavern for hands of cutthroat three-hand pinochle in the back room, something Dad or Grandpa never did.

The thunder storm crashed and poured all night. In the morning, the oat field was flattened. The sun didn’t come out for a week and by then grass was growing through the straw and the oat crop was a total loss.

Dad and Grandpa were lucky. They also had a field of wheat that was shorter and a week behind the oats. Dad had wondered if he would have to cut the wheat before it was ready because we would have the thrashing machine for a few days before it moved on to the next job. The shorter stalks stood up to the rain and were not flattened. By the time the sun returned, the wheat was in prime shape and delivered a good crop that didn’t make up for the lost oats, but averted disaster.

It wasn’t the best year, but we made it through.

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Digging Potatoes

I saw a truck load of potatoes in a hopper truck pass through Ferndale yesterday. Somebody must be digging potatoes. From my fleeting view, the potatoes looked good—not too large, uniform size, smooth, clean. U.S. No. 1s, washed and graded in the field and ready for the warehouse. That’s not the way it was done on Waschke Road.

Potatoes on Waschke Road

My grandpa, Gus, was called the Potato King of Whatcom County in Roth’s History of Whatcom County in the 1920s. I don’t know much about the way he raised potatoes in those days, but I have good memories of my dad, Ted, and Grandpa raising potatoes in the 50s and 60s while I was growing up. Like many things on the homestead, planting and digging potatoes was a community event.

Planting

Planting in the spring began with preparing the seed potatoes. Grandpa would choose the best-looking potatoes to set aside for seed for next year. When Grandpa quit selecting the seed, Dad switched to buying certified seed potatoes—White Rose, Netted Gems, and Kennebecs as I remember.

There is an art to cutting seed potatoes. Sprouts start from potato eyes. A whole potato usually has many more eyes than needed for planting, so cutting seed potatoes can double or triple the yield from a sack of seed. Grandpa liked three to five eyes per potato piece planted. Dad, Grandpa, and sometimes my mother, would cut potatoes for several days in late winter getting ready for planting. To speed the work, Grandpa built two “seed cutters,” hoppers with slanted floors he filled with whole seed potatoes. The potatoes exited through an adjustable door that controlled the rate they rolled out onto a tray, which had a fixed vertical knife to slice the potatoes into chunks with the right number of eyes. The chunks fell into a sack and were dusted with sulfur, ready for the potato planter. The knives were kept sharp and I remember cutting myself badly on one when I tried my hand at cutting.

We had a two-row potato planter that required three men to operate. A tractor or team of horses pulled the planter. A set of disks opened trenches into which seed potato chunks dropped. My dad drove the tractor. Two men riding on seats behind the planter regulated the flow of potatoes into the trenches. Sometimes, when help from neighbors was short, my cousin Dave and I got to ride the planter and distribute the falling potatoes, a job that required more concentration and dexterity than you might expect. Another set of disks closed the trenches. It took a full day to plant five or ten acres of potatoes. We planted potatoes in early spring and more often than not, finished planting in the rain.

Dad cultivated the potato field several times during the growing season. The rows were spaced so he could drive the cultivator between the rows and eliminate weeds.

Digging

I looked forward to potato digging in the fall. Dad and Grandpa said that potatoes grew best near the woods, maybe because potatoes prefer acid soil, which meant bright fall leaves, especially the bigleaf maples, were always close in the background. The weather was cool enough for jackets and the air was moist with the fall scent of ripe oat and wheat fields and fruit orchards.

We had a single row potato digger that was pulled by the tractor. The digger was a blade that sliced a foot or so into the ground under the potatoes and vines. The potatoes, vines, and dirt went onto a wide chain belt that shook the dirt off and deposited the potatoes on top of the ground behind the digger. Our digger started out as a horse-drawn implement with a seat for driving the horses. When the potato vines were heavy, someone got to sit on the seat above the chain belt and use their feet to push the dry potato vines along and out the back of the digger. That job often went to a kid with legs long enough to push the vines, usually me or one of my cousins. That job was easy and fun.

The rest of the crew of relatives and neighbors “cleared vines” and “picked potatoes.” The vine clearers threw the vines to the side with pitch forks and the pickers followed, dragging burlap sacks between their legs, and tossing in the potatoes. The star pickers had heavy belts with hooks for the sacks so they could pick with both hands. When a sack was full, the picker would stand it up and grab a new sack from a pile of empties on the flatbed hay wagon.

While my Dad operated the digger, one of the neighbor’s tractors would pull a hay wagon through the field and the men would load on the sacks of freshly picked potatoes. When the wagon was filled, we’d haul it to the house and roll the potatoes down chutes through the basement windows where the potatoes would rest until they were graded and sold on “the route,” Dad and Grandpa’s weekly trip with the pickup truck to a string of small grocery stores and homes in Bellingham. In big crop years, the potatoes that would not fit in the house basement were stored in pits dug into the ground in protected spots in the woods. They lined the pits with cedar rails and straw, then covered the pits with dirt so the potatoes would not freeze.

Grading and selling

Grandpa and Dad sold Washington Combination 75% U.S. No. 1s on the route. As I understood it, we only sold U.S. No. 1 potatoes, but by calling them Combination 75% No. 1, we did not have to pay to have the spuds inspected. We might have gotten more for 100% No. 1s, but not enough to make up for the inspection fee. In any case, Waschke potatoes had a good reputation; the grocers on the route paid Dad and Grandpa a good price no matter what the grade. They also sold potatoes and eggs to Pete Vike, a purchasing agent, who provisioned the galleys of freighters that docked in Bellingham Bay in the 1950s.

Most of the potatoes were stored in the basement of the house. Grandpa and Dad did the grading. A No. 1 potato is smooth and evenly shaped, not small, has no knobs, rough spots, or scabs, and, above all, is not hollow. Large potatoes often have an inner chamber lined with skin. I don’t know why this is a defect. I like baked potato skin and an extra skin on the inside sounds to me like an improvement, but, no matter, a hollow potato was a cull. Any potato large enough to risk being hollow, Dad and Grandpa fed to the animals.

The potato grader was a chute, about thirty inches wide and six feet long built by my grandpa that sat in the basement. The bottom was slats and it was inclined downward at about a 20 degree angle. Potatoes were dumped onto the high end of the grader and they rolled downwards, dirt falling off through the slats. Dad and Grandpa would inspect the potatoes as they rolled downwards and toss any culls that didn’t make the grade into a bushel basket destined to the cows or the pigs. Potatoes that made it all the way to the lower end of the grader went into a burlap sack. When the sack was about filled, it was shifted onto the scales and was filled to exactly one hundred pounds for sale on the route.

This all sounds like a lot of hard, boring, manual labor. I suppose it was, but it didn’t feel that way. The crew of relatives, friends, and neighbors were on a mission. Not a dollar changed hands for the work of in the potato fields. Those who helped got potatoes on their dinner tables, help with haying, cow dehorning, a share in the offal at butchering time– help whenever they needed it. That’s the way it worked on Waschke Road.