The saving of Lily Point from development has been a big source of good feelings here in Pt. Roberts over the last year. Well, maybe the would-be developers weren’t so happy, but they have plenty of other things to be unhappy about and the idea that their ostensibly developable property is bounded by a park can’t be a bad thing. Well, not exactly a park, more a marine reserve. And therein lies a tale, I’m afraid.
Last week, the P.R. Historical Society announced a meeting to have a discussion between and among various interested parties, including the Historical Society, the Nature Conservancy, the County Parks people, and P.R. residents as to the plan to remove the pilings, metal debris, and other sources of shoreline evidence of the historical APA Cannery from Lily Point. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to attend, but here's how Meg Olson described some of the commentary from the recent first anniversary celebration of the County’s acquisition of the land in the All Point Bulletin:
“Some relics of the Alaska Packers Association remain, from lilac trees planted around the long-gone manager’s house, to the old water tank and remaining pilings. Bean said less obvious relics told the story of a more ancient and long-lived tribal fishery that thrived at Lily Point for generations before being displaced by the cannery and the fish traps.
“The cannery came in 1917 and they chose this location because they could see the native peoples were making quite a haul here. Sadly they disrupted how things had been for a very long time,” Bean said.”
Here’s what the Nature Conservancy’s Spring issue of Washington Wildlands said about the same topic: ‘The Conservancy plans to work with the Whatcom County parks department and other partners to restore the site, including removal of pilings, slag, and debris from the tidelands so they’ll no longer impede the sediment from reaching the beaches of Lily Point and western Boundary Bay. Ultimately, Whatcom County Parks will manage the site for recreation and conservation.’’
What we’ve got here, I suspect, is several different ideas about what the Lily Point acquisition was/is about. For some, it was preserving forested land from development; for some it was providing additional recreation facilities; for some it was restoring an ecological system. For some, it included preserving important historical and cultural phenomena. I doubt very seriously that Governor Gregoire or Whatcom County cared at all about preventing development in Point Roberts, per se, or preserving historical markers of the APA Cannery. I suspect that County and State marine biologists are largely motivated by the idea that they will now be able to “restore” the ecology of some tiny part of Puget Sound. I think this might require some careful working out of different and--one might hope—ultimately overlapping agendas.
Here are some pictures of the pilings remaining from the APA Cannery at Lily Point. It’s hard to imagine that the pilings themselves, none of them very large after almost a hundred years, constitute some major impediment to Puget Sound’s integrity, though. I guess that’s my opening position.
Showing posts with label historical society. Show all posts
Showing posts with label historical society. Show all posts
Monday, May 25, 2009
Thursday, January 8, 2009
APA Road House
The abandoned house on the tract of land off APA is one of the three ‘big’ abandoned houses on the Point: ‘big’ in the sense of well-known, because everybody sees them regularly, because they are on the main roads. They are all three what I think of as original houses, which is to say houses that the Icelandic settlers who came here from Vancouver Island would have known, would still recognize if they were to return, even though all three have long been without tenants.
If Point Roberts was seriously into the history business, they would be ‘historic houses,’ and at least one of them would have been restored and tourists would come and walk through the rooms to see how the fishermen and farmers and their wives lived here a hundred years ago. As it is, despite the good and steady work of the P.R. Historical Society to keep the Point’s history before our eyes, the houses are just an owner away (and maybe less) from being razed.
Within the past ten years, they were charged with being eyesores and dangerous structures, but most of them survived that kerfuffle. Nevertheless, they are still somewhat susceptible to wind and weather damage. Fortunately, they are very well made houses, sturdy lumber that endures even without an owner’s care, perhaps because of the nature of their construction. I have been told by various people that much of the wood used in these original houses came from fish traps, meaning the wood would have been well-seasoned in the ocean before it came to hold up the houses.
But no quality of wood, no aesthetic or historic value stands in the way of those who are indifferent to the houses’ value in comparison to a desire to build a bigger, fancier, up-to-the-minute house on these beautiful great lots. It is a different kind of beauty than Lily Point, of course, but I find it no less beautiful because it is grassland rather than tree land, no less worthy of being preserved. These are the sites of the farms that fed more than lived here. These are the sites of apple orchards whose variety name is no longer known. They are, in a sense, abandoned; but in another sense, they are vibrantly with us, filled with what they were, as seen through
what they are in the process of becoming.
The first time I saw the APA Road house, it looked like this picture. I couldn’t actually get right up to the house because it was surrounded by closely growing brambles. But it stood very straight; none of the sloping roofs or sagging window frames I’ve seen on the newer abandoned houses. It’s been about six years since I took that picture.
Last month, I took this picture. I think the property must have been bought in the past year or so because the grasses have all been cut back, making the house more accessible and making it easier for strangers to assist in its decline. The cutting of the fields around the house also makes the house look exposed, frailer, more accepting of the razing that is bound to be in its future.
The quilt of the house is 42”x34” and was completed in 2003. The day I finished it, I was driving down APA Road (incidentally, APA stands for Alaska Packers’ Association, the owners of the cannery that was in P.R.) and glanced out the car window at the house as I went by. There, in exactly what would be the lower left corner of the quilt, was a coyote, almost invisible against the tall grasses and bushes. I turned right around and went home to see if I could incorporate him into the quilt, but it was too late. And now, we rarely see coyotes. When I see the house nowadays, with its ‘KEEP OUT’ sign and chain next to the road, I feel strongly that it may be too late for it, too.
If Point Roberts was seriously into the history business, they would be ‘historic houses,’ and at least one of them would have been restored and tourists would come and walk through the rooms to see how the fishermen and farmers and their wives lived here a hundred years ago. As it is, despite the good and steady work of the P.R. Historical Society to keep the Point’s history before our eyes, the houses are just an owner away (and maybe less) from being razed.
Within the past ten years, they were charged with being eyesores and dangerous structures, but most of them survived that kerfuffle. Nevertheless, they are still somewhat susceptible to wind and weather damage. Fortunately, they are very well made houses, sturdy lumber that endures even without an owner’s care, perhaps because of the nature of their construction. I have been told by various people that much of the wood used in these original houses came from fish traps, meaning the wood would have been well-seasoned in the ocean before it came to hold up the houses.
But no quality of wood, no aesthetic or historic value stands in the way of those who are indifferent to the houses’ value in comparison to a desire to build a bigger, fancier, up-to-the-minute house on these beautiful great lots. It is a different kind of beauty than Lily Point, of course, but I find it no less beautiful because it is grassland rather than tree land, no less worthy of being preserved. These are the sites of the farms that fed more than lived here. These are the sites of apple orchards whose variety name is no longer known. They are, in a sense, abandoned; but in another sense, they are vibrantly with us, filled with what they were, as seen through
what they are in the process of becoming.
The first time I saw the APA Road house, it looked like this picture. I couldn’t actually get right up to the house because it was surrounded by closely growing brambles. But it stood very straight; none of the sloping roofs or sagging window frames I’ve seen on the newer abandoned houses. It’s been about six years since I took that picture.
Last month, I took this picture. I think the property must have been bought in the past year or so because the grasses have all been cut back, making the house more accessible and making it easier for strangers to assist in its decline. The cutting of the fields around the house also makes the house look exposed, frailer, more accepting of the razing that is bound to be in its future.
The quilt of the house is 42”x34” and was completed in 2003. The day I finished it, I was driving down APA Road (incidentally, APA stands for Alaska Packers’ Association, the owners of the cannery that was in P.R.) and glanced out the car window at the house as I went by. There, in exactly what would be the lower left corner of the quilt, was a coyote, almost invisible against the tall grasses and bushes. I turned right around and went home to see if I could incorporate him into the quilt, but it was too late. And now, we rarely see coyotes. When I see the house nowadays, with its ‘KEEP OUT’ sign and chain next to the road, I feel strongly that it may be too late for it, too.
Monday, September 8, 2008
It's All History
Yesterday and everything before that: history. All we know: history. Our entire lives: history. You might think with history comprising almost everything about people that people would be more interested in history. But, it seems so, well, past. Even Point Roberts, anomaly that it is, joins the rest of the world in having a history. And it also has a historical society. What it doesn’t have, though there have certainly been efforts to obtain it, is a place for the records of its history to call home. There’s a community project in need of being taken up by the larger community.
The historical society also has an extensive collection of photographs of Point Roberts and of its inhabitants of long years back. I’ve seen a number of them because the Point Roberts Quilt Group looked at them before it made the Community Quilt that hangs in the Community Center. Each block in that quilt is based upon an actual photograph of a Point Roberts long gone. I made the one that has what looks like a lifeguard station at Lighthouse Park, but is actually the lighthouse that was there before it was a park. And also the heron part of the center panel.
The Historical Society has turned some of the photographs into notecards that are sold at The Blue Heron. The Society also runs programs each year, including an excellent one on the Point Roberts’ cemetery. An accompanying booklet is available from them about the cemetery and its origin and experiences. And some years back, the Society sponsored a show of 'Abandoned Houses of Point Roberts,' a series of wall quilts I made. They've been terrific to work with.
Most recently, the Society put out a call for those of us who are the Point Roberts of the ever-so-brief present (and who will be part of the Point Roberts past all too quickly) to write the story of how they came to Point Roberts. They hope to collect enough to create and ultimately publish a kind of social history of our own times, a time when photographs are so voluminous that they need to be accompanied by more words than are now being written. There used to be letters and journals to tell about daily life and daily decisions. Now, there are blogs, of course. But I can count on the fingers of one finger the number of actual letters I’ve received in the mail during the past eight months. So the Historical Society is hoping to get people to do a little writing, and their members will be responsible for keeping track of it. Imagine, years in the future, social historians and local scholars reading through your accounts of how you got here (that, of course, assumes you actually are here). Imagine you, in the nearer future, reading about how your friends and neighbors got here.
I wrote ours awhile back and a nice guy from the group called me up today and thanked me. That alone might be enough reason to get your story to them. He’ll probably call you, too. Anyway, if you are a local dweller and own a pencil or pen, you can send your story to The Point Roberts Historical Society, at PO Box 780, 98281. And if you don’t have a pencil or any paper or a stamp even, you can just email it to them at historicalsociety, followed by at-pointroberts-dot-net. (Do the address the right way; I just write it this way to keep their spam mail somewhat reduced.)
The historical society also has an extensive collection of photographs of Point Roberts and of its inhabitants of long years back. I’ve seen a number of them because the Point Roberts Quilt Group looked at them before it made the Community Quilt that hangs in the Community Center. Each block in that quilt is based upon an actual photograph of a Point Roberts long gone. I made the one that has what looks like a lifeguard station at Lighthouse Park, but is actually the lighthouse that was there before it was a park. And also the heron part of the center panel.
The Historical Society has turned some of the photographs into notecards that are sold at The Blue Heron. The Society also runs programs each year, including an excellent one on the Point Roberts’ cemetery. An accompanying booklet is available from them about the cemetery and its origin and experiences. And some years back, the Society sponsored a show of 'Abandoned Houses of Point Roberts,' a series of wall quilts I made. They've been terrific to work with.
Most recently, the Society put out a call for those of us who are the Point Roberts of the ever-so-brief present (and who will be part of the Point Roberts past all too quickly) to write the story of how they came to Point Roberts. They hope to collect enough to create and ultimately publish a kind of social history of our own times, a time when photographs are so voluminous that they need to be accompanied by more words than are now being written. There used to be letters and journals to tell about daily life and daily decisions. Now, there are blogs, of course. But I can count on the fingers of one finger the number of actual letters I’ve received in the mail during the past eight months. So the Historical Society is hoping to get people to do a little writing, and their members will be responsible for keeping track of it. Imagine, years in the future, social historians and local scholars reading through your accounts of how you got here (that, of course, assumes you actually are here). Imagine you, in the nearer future, reading about how your friends and neighbors got here.
I wrote ours awhile back and a nice guy from the group called me up today and thanked me. That alone might be enough reason to get your story to them. He’ll probably call you, too. Anyway, if you are a local dweller and own a pencil or pen, you can send your story to The Point Roberts Historical Society, at PO Box 780, 98281. And if you don’t have a pencil or any paper or a stamp even, you can just email it to them at historicalsociety, followed by at-pointroberts-dot-net. (Do the address the right way; I just write it this way to keep their spam mail somewhat reduced.)
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