DUNGENESS — Art Rogers remembers simpler times in the Sequim-Dungeness Valley when as a 12-year-old farm boy, he was hired to milk a dairy family’s 35 cows and watch their farm while they headed East to visit relatives.
“And I had to go to school,” added Rogers, 75, who was born in a home still standing on West Alder Street in Sequim near Helen Haller Elementary School today.
“I must have done pretty good because the health inspectors came, and I wasn’t getting any digs,” he said with a smile.
Rogers and 81-year-old Doug McGinnes shared their memories of Dungeness and Sequim on Friday at the 1893 Dungeness Schoolhouse.
The presentation was the first in a series of the Museum & Arts Center’s Lecture Series, a Peninsula College class hosted by the Museum & Arts Center of the Sequim-Dungeness Valley.
The second lecture is at 10 a.m. Friday at the schoolhouse, 2781 Towne Road.
It will feature Clare Manis Hatler, who will talked about the Manis mastodon archaeological site in Happy Valley.
Rogers fondly remembered growing up in Dungeness, one of a family of 12 children, a time when youngsters were always working on one farm or another around the Dungeness Valley, he said.
“This was the way . . . everybody had to work,” he told about 87 who crowded into the former schoolroom.
While he loved the work, from milking cows to hoeing weeds and tilling fields on a tractor, it kept him from participating in after-school sports.
Getting up at 4 a.m. to milk the cows and again at 4 p.m. seven days a week can do that.
“We were what I would call a poor family, but we were a healthy family,” he said.
Because of the seemingly never-ending bounty of shellfish and fish from near the flood-prone mouth of the Dungeness River at Dungeness Bay, fruits and vegetables, milk and cheese, and other homegrown meats, no one ever went hungry.
Rogers recalled the flood of 1949 that destroyed Dungeness River bridges and attending class at Dungeness Schoolhouse.
“The schoolhouse was always high and dry,” he said.
“We didn’t have no sports. We just had three mean teachers,” he quipped, drawing laughter.
He remembered ice-skating on what was then called Pettett Pond. It was shallow and, when unfrozen, rippled by the winds off the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
In the late 1940s, he remembered Clark Road, where the Clark family grew tulips and the Bigelows grew colorful lilies.
“It was just beautiful to go up Clark Road and see all these flowers,” he said.
McInnes, 81 — the author of Sequim Yesterday: Local History Through the Eyes of Sequim Old-Timers, published in 2005 SEmD noted a number of Sequim-Dungeness pioneers in the audience — at least 12 — and joked that it was good to see them there “to keep me a little more honest.”
McInnes said his family came to the valley “a little bit after Lincoln was elected president” in 1860.
Reading from his book, he said the first cow came over the Strait of Juan de Fuca to Dungeness.
“The thing I always imagine is the first cow came from Victoria,” he said. “It was a cow standing up in a canoe.”
Other key historic happenings he cited included the first saloon built in Dungeness in 1862, the first Clallam County courthouse built in 1865 in what was called New Dungeness, and the jail built not long after the tavern opened.
The only mercantile store on the county’s East End was located in Dungeness at the time.
McInnes said the courthouse was moved to Port Angeles, in part because it was a population center with a deepwater harbor, while Dungeness Bay was silting in, requiring the construction of a nearly mile-long dock in 1890, stretching out into the Strait.
As the story goes, McInnes said, the move was somewhat by force, and the courthouse records were stolen one night and hauled to Port Angeles.
Pilings remaining from the long dock can still be seen today.
While Dungeness Bay was originally a port of entry for Dungeness, the earliest pioneer settlement in the county, Port Williams was a port of entry for Sequim, he said.
The speed limit past the school on Sequim Avenue was 6 mph in 1916, according to McInnes, “probably to not scare the horses.”
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Jeff Chew can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at jeff.chew@peninsuladailynews.com.