Summer fun in the 20th Century

By Kay F. Reinartz

While winters on Salmon Bay were, and are still, marked by lots of damp chilly weather, the summers were generally dry and sunny with light long into the evening.

Ballard, like West Seattle, was blessed with wide sandy beaches. Golden Gardens, then as now, drew the young people with bathing and beach games during the warm summer afternoons. As night fell beach fires appeared all along the shoreline. Capt. Gunnar Olsborg recalled hearing about all-night beach parties at Golden Gardens in the early 1900s sponsored, and carefully chaperoned, by some of the Ballard churches.

In the late 19th and early decades of the 20th century few families could afford to take vacations in the sense that we understand the term, that is, packing up and going someplace for a few weeks. However, people went away by going camping. They did not have to go far to find nice woods to camp in since the entire area was only a few decades away from being a primeval forest. Thus it was that Ballard families often went camping for weeks at a time in the summer by going across Salmon Bay to Magnolia.

Helen Barnes, daughter of a pioneer family (Barnes Avenue near the Ballard Hospital is named for this family) provides a lively picture of her family's annual summer outings to Magnolia in an oral history recorded for "Passport to Ballard." Helen tells that in the early 1920s Magnolia was still a dense forest.

Her family and several other close families went together, generally around a dozen adults and children. Their equipment consisted of heavy canvas tents, blanket bedrolls cooking utensils, dishes, food and fishing gear. Since no one had a car and the street car did not run close by their home, everyone walked down to Salmon Bay with everything carried in homemade backpacks. Below the locks they traveled over to Magnolia by rowboat.

There were no homes or any kind of development along the Magnolia shoreline at this time.

Helen narrates:

"We could set up camp and everyone help. We slept on the ground with the tent rigged over the top of us. All the cooking was done on an open fire. We had to hike to the lighthouse and carry [our] water back-a couple of miles. We would troll and catch cutthroat trout; there was plenty then. The water wasn't polluted...clams were there for the digging. Part of our [daily] menu was clams and fish. We went swimming in the Sound. We always had a wonderful time and after a week or more of living on the beach made the return boat trip and walked home tired and happy."