poultry past
The whole point of this Spring Jubilee we got going on right now is to make sure agriculture and its heritage aren’t some historical footnotes in the near future. As, sadly, it is on the tideflats of the once proud South End.
The South End wasn’t always the Backwash Dead End far flung terminus of Camano Island. Back in its heyday, about 1915, it was a thriving port with a 1000 foot wharf jutting proudly out into the storm tossed Puget Sound. The Atalanta and other mosquito fleet supply boats moored up for deliveries and mail 2 or 3 times a week, dropping shipments and taking on passengers.
Mabana—– crown jewel of the Saratoga Straits. The Seattle classifieds advertised 5 acre parcels perfectly suitable for chicken ranching. So the Roaring 20’s on the South End were more like the Cackling 20’s. The wharf, of course, sticking out into the full fury of the Sound, got whittled down to the piling stumps you can see today at minus tides, stubby footprints leading far out to Davy Jones’ Locker and away from the Lost Civilization of Greater Metropolitan Mabana.
Oh, we still got a Port of Mabana, a one lane road sloughing its way toward obliteration. And we got 3 Port commissioners, ditto, a kind of vestigial South End government about as pertinent to our lives as the Island County regime that’s barely conscious of Camano much less our South End.
But as always, we seem to manage, if not quite thrive. History is like the tides, an ebb and flow, or in our case, an egg and flow, and what WAS might easily be reduced to rubble and ruin. Or pilings and rebar. The South End rose once toward soaring heights, Chicken Capitol of the Far West. And if that grandeur is lost now, we can take some small comfort in knowing, once, in a lifetime not that long ago, in a place not too greatly changed, we raised the cholesterol level of the world a notch or two. Not much to crow about, I know……. unless you’re a South End chicken farmer.
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