It might just be family legend, but I’m going with mom’s recounting as gospel. She never was a tall tale teller.
She spoke many times about her efforts to solve a big dilemma when employed by the Washington state Department of Transportation.
Turns out saving the multiple name-bearing Giant Red Cedar Stump in 1971 didn’t stymie Frances Elizabeth “Libby” Graves Charnley Tilse.
The remains of the humongous 20-some-foot tall red cedar tree base needed a new home when highway reconfigurations demanded the site where it sat north of Everett.
Rather than see it destroyed, mom found a solution to the logistics involved in moving and rehoming the Snohomish County roadside attraction, 40 miles north of Seattle.
She secured a resting place for it at the northbound I-5 Smokey Point Rest Area, milepost 207, near Arlington, Washington.
Proverbial tongue in cheek, Atlasobscura.com reports, “The tree stump was moved … to help people emotionally recover from the horrors of Seattle traffic as they head north on I-5.”
Ever since, often when any of mom’s kids are driving north on the freeway, we’ll pull into the rest area, walk through it, take a photo or three, read the sign telling some of its story and say, “Nice work, mom.”
The 200-foot-tall, 68-foot-wide giant, surpassed the height of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, which stands at 185 feet along the angle of its lean.
Arlington also has a second ginormous red cedar remnant of note, a hollowed out stump with roofing that gives it a hobbit house appearance in the Stillaguamish Valley Pioneer Museum parking lot.
“The stump (tree) had grown on the farm of (local historian Loren) Kraetz’s great-uncle, 2.5 miles west of Arlington on Highway 530, before it was cut in approximately 1909 to be made into shingle bolts.”
These are small cubes of western red cedar later processed into red cedar roof shingles.
Kraetz estimated its age to be 2,100 years old. The museum has used it as a storage shed and stage among other uses since 1935.
The Arlington Times reported in 2008 that the “cedars were typically chopped 10-12 feet above ground, since that’s where the wood tended to grow less twisted, with a finer grain that made it easier to cut.
Kraetz interviewed pioneers who “lived in the houses fashioned out of those stumps, since the wood at the core of those trees was often softer and more easily hollowed-out and many cedars were mostly hollow near the bottom anyway.”
At one time in the not too distant past the Northwest was carpeted with these titan old-growth trees, reports NPR.org.
The trees often had gnarled bases that presented a challenge to early loggers bearing only hand saws and axes, Pacific Northwest historian Robert Ficken told npr.org.
“Once the loggers managed to cut them down, the giant logs were hauled away. But the giant stumps were left behind to rot,” NPR reported.
Until all the trees were gone, Arlington was a major lumbering center.
“People don’t realize that there were trees like that to begin with,” said Helen Starr, the 92-year-old daughter of a lumberman. The Stillaguamish Valley Pioneer Museum volunteer spoke with NPR in 2005.
The Olympic National Park notes the largest western red cedar in the world — Washington state’s largest tree — is a Duncan cedar on the Olympic Peninsula near Kalaloch.
Arlington’s Stump at Smokey Point is stated to have been at least 1,250 years old when it was “discovered by early settlers in the area in about 1880,” according to pnwadventuresisters.wordpress.com.
The Arlington Times reported … “A party of nine went down from this place last Sunday to satisfy themselves of the truth of what by them were regarded as exaggerated reports of its size.
“It has been claimed that the tree is 99 feet in circumference, but the measurement taken Sunday shows it to be about 68 feet. If measured around the roots and knotty protuberances the tree would likely measure the 99 feet claimed for it. About 25 feet from the ground, the tree forked into four ‘immense branches.’ ”
But wait, the honor of knowing about those ancient behemoths doesn’t go to the pioneers.
The federally recognized Stillaguamish Tribe of Native Americans, a Southern Coast Salish people, has had a significant presence in the area for 11,000 years or so.
They are descendants of the original Stoluck-wa-mish people who lived along the Stillaguamish River since the end of the last glacial maximum, stillaguamish.com says. Their traditional territories encompassed the area around present-day Arlington and Stanwood.
So they’re the ones who lived among or near these massive trees, which, interestingly, they didn’t clear cut.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Scandinavian immigrants, particularly Norwegians and Swedes, played a significant role in Western Washington’s logging industry.
No surprise, then, that several lumberjacks with Scandinavian-sounding names had a hand in reshaping and moving the behemoth.
In 1893 a fire started in The Stump’s hollow core caused it to die.
After the top was removed, in 1916 Paul Wangsmo and Ole Rodway chopped three spines from the stump’s core and fashioned three archways, making it big enough for automobiles to drive through.
Slim Husby and Ole Reinseth cut it from its base in 1922 and with horse teams dragged it 150 yards north of its original location and placed it on a concrete base where it became a roadside attraction.
The big cedar stayed on that pedestal until 1939. Time caused its enormous walls to crack so it was dismantled in sections and brought to a third location on the newly completed U.S. Pacific Highway 99.
A sign identified it as a “Relic of a Vanquished Forest.”
In its heyday, many a car motored through the trunk base, including Crown Prince Olav and Princess Martha of Norway who navigated its tunnel on May 27, 1939, during their 10-week tour of America.
The royals successfully passed “through this often sideswiped artifact without hitting it.”
A plaque overhead reads, “Relic of a Vanquished Forest / Western Red Cedar / (Thuja Plicata Don) /Age 1,250 years / Preserved at Request of Snohomish Co. Pioneers /A.D. Arlington, Washington 1922.”
It now bears a substantial weather-shedding peaked roof and is reinforced with an interior heavy metal tubing framework.
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