A few more owners of the West Parcel: E.E. Scott and J.H. Jenkins

A visit to the Northwest Regional Branch of the Washington State Archives last week revealed that the West Parcel of the Point changed hands a few more times than previously thought.

E.E. Scott

When Thomas McTighe, the original homesteader, died in 1909, he evidently died intestate, as his estate, including his land at Lake Samish, came under the administration of F.J. Barlow of the State of Washington.

On April 22, 1910, F.J. Barlow executed an administrator's deed to sell the Lake Samish property to E.E. Scott for $3,000, as shown in the pages below from the deed volume.

Source of both images: Washington State Archives, Northwest Regional Branch

According to Lottie Roeder Roth's History of Whatcom County Volume 2, E.E. Scott was born in Kansas. After working in the lumber business in Iowa and North Dakota, he came to Washington and eventually settled in Bellingham in 1906, where he became sales manager for Whatcom Falls Mill Company.

George Loggie

Whatcom Falls Mill Company was owned by George W. Loggie, whom we know owned the West Parcel of the Point in 1916. And in fact it was Scott who sold it to him. On May 10, 1910, less than three weeks after Scott purchased McTighe's Lake Samish land for $3,000, he sold it to George Loggie for "One dollar and other considerations in hand paid."

Presumably, Scott procured the property on behalf of his boss in the first place, and was compensated for it via those "other considerations" obliquely mentioned in the deed.

J.H. Jenkins

Another new owner name was discovered in a 1929 map from the Whatcom Photo Archives, which shows that the West Parcel of the Point was owned by someone named J.H. Jenkins.

Source: Whatcom Photo Archives

Corroborating information about a J.H. Jenkins in Bellingham or Whatcom County has so far been hard to come by. None of the Bellingham city directories of the period show a J.H. Jenkins, for example.

Another trip to the Washington State Archives should be able to tell us if Loggie sold the property to Jenkins, and if Jenkins then sold it to Einar Erickson (the next owner we know about based on a 1934 map), or whether there were any other interim owners.

The East Parcel: School Land

In the Galen Biery edition of the Harris Journal is a map of the original homesteaders at Lake Samish. (The Lake Samish Association's history web page includes a scanned copy of the Harris Journal, though without the map.) The Point is within parcels 9 and 10:

As described in the last post, Parcel 10 (the West Parcel) was first homesteaded by Thomas McTighe (though the year given on the Harris map, 1893, conflicts with the year of 1899 shown on the government homestead record). Parcel 9 (the East Parcel), however, was not homesteaded by an individual, but rather was designated as school land.

The Harris Journal states that a school was established at Lake Samish during that period, but not within Parcel 9. Instead, the first school at Lake Samish seems to have been established on Sam Humphries' land in Parcel 5, and the Lake Samish Association's history page corroborates this. Why the school was built outside the designated school land is a curiosity yet to be resolved.

First Homesteader: Thomas McTighe

The property now known as "the Point" at 394 Shallow Shores Road, Lake Samish, was originally divided in two: the West Parcel (in section 35 of Township 37, Range 3E) and the  East Parcel (lots 12 through 15 in section 36 of the same township and range). Thomas McTighe acquired the West Parcel in approximately 1899 through the Homestead Act.

McTighe, originally from Louisiana, was a veteran of the American Civil War (1861-65), having enlisted as a Confederate soldier at the age of 13, according to his gravestone in the Bayview Cemetery in Bellingham. The 1900 census listed him as a farmer and widower. 

When he died in 1909 at the age of 63, McTighe’s obituary said he had been a Whatcom County resident for a number of years, “living on his ranch near Lake Samish.”