Oysterville Connections — Then and Now

The Holway Family, Next Door Neighbors

Katherine Holway Smith, an Oysterville neighbor in the days of our girlhood, came visiting for a few minutes yesterday.   Her brother Johnny and I were the same age – almost.  He was a week younger than I, but by the time either of us cared about who was older, he was taller and stronger and didn’t much give me the time of day and, probably, vice-versa.  I was more apt to play with his younger sisters Ruthie and Annie and maybe a little bit with Susie.  Katherine was the youngest and I remember feeling important when we older girls were asked to “keep an eye on her.”

The Holway family had close Seattle ties, especially with the University of Washington.  Their grandparents lived right near the campus in a house handy for their chemistry professor grandfather (in the very house Katherine and her family live in now, if I’m not mistaken) and it was their dad Ted’s connection with the biology department at ‘the U’ that brought him and his young wife to Oysterville in the 1930s.   Their Uncle Vance, a research professor of zoology, was also affiliated with ‘the U.’  When the kids talked about Seattle, I was fascinated.  My own family connections were mostly in Portland – not nearly as exotic in my young mind.

Transportation to/from Portland, early 1900s

Those ‘big city’ connections are still interesting to me. For the earliest settlers in Oysterville, the go-to ‘urban’ areas were San Francisco and, a little later, Portland.  With the main transportation routes by water, that made perfect sense – down the coast to San Francisco or up the river to Portland.  Plus, as my grandfather used to point out, Seattle “wasn’t much” until the end of the nineteenth century. He once showed me that on the map of Washington in the 1891 Encyclopedia Britannica, Oysterville was in larger print than Seattle – a sure sign of which was most important, he said.

Even getting to the Territorial Capital of Olympia was difficult.  In those early days, it required three steamers and three stage lines to carry mail and passengers from Astoria via Fort Canby, Oysterville, Bay Center, South Bend, Riverside (Raymond), Woodard’s Landing, North Cove, Peterson’s Point (Westport), Montesano to Olympia.  Total time for that incredible mail run: sixty hours, no doubt beating today’s record!

South Bend Train Depot

Despite the train to South Bend and steamer connections to Nahcotta by the 1890s, it wasn’t until roads and automobiles “came in” (as the expression went) that the Peninsula began to have a greater association with Seattle and other points north and east.  That was in “the teens and twenties.”  By the time young Ted and Virginia Holway came to Oysterville in the 1930s, Seattle had discovered us and vice versa.

Although it is changing these days, it still seems that folks with pre-automobile roots here on the Peninsula are more likely to have connections to Portland and those with later associations (since the days of autos and highways) are just as likely to have a Seattle connection.  Check it out, next time you meet someone whose family has been here “a long time.”

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