Take a look into ‘Old Time’ Kingston
Published 1:00 am Saturday, September 20, 2008
Heritage Day honors past next Saturday.
KINGSTON — Back when women sewed their own long-sleeved, floor-length dresses and suspender-wearing men logged tall cedar trees for shakes, Kingston wasn’t a major destination.
Next Saturday marks the third annual Heritage Day gathering for the town and a complete step back in time.
Townsfolk are dressing up in period costumes to enjoy fall-time baked goods and cider as well as wagon rides through downtown.
To prepare for entering the time portal — unseen to the human eye, but located somewhere between Kingston Thriftway and Mike Wallace Park — local historian Harriet Muhrlein shares a few stories to set the scene. She and others belonging to the Kingston Historical Society will be available Saturday from 1-4 p.m. to share tales of long ago.
It was the mid 1800s. The town’s original pioneers were involved with fishing, gardening and lumbering.
“Kingston has always been a way-back-when kind of place,” Muhrlein said. “It’s never been a center of commerce of one thing. There’s always been people in the community that have done a variety of activities. When the fisherman weren’t fishing they were farming between the (tree) stumps.”
Muhrlein, who doubles as president of the historical society, said she believes the town was never a central destination because its people were too independent and raised as self-sufficient pioneers. That’s not to say they didn’t struggle, however.
Times of early settlement were full of trials and tribulations, she said. Getting to know the law of the land was tricky and frustrating at times.
“They started out with the lumbering in the 1850s but they found when the tide was out they couldn’t get any ships into Appletree Cove,” she said.
When the area’s first Kingston to Edmonds ferry started, back in the 1920s, the town scheduled a huge celebration.
The day before it was supposed to carry its first passengers and vehicles, a trial run preformed at top-notch.
However, on the day of it’s first official run, the ferry wouldn’t start, Muhrlein said.
“It refused to start, newspapers said.”
Robert Johnson, 73, also belongs to the historical society. He lives on the same piece of property his grandparents bought back in 1920.
“It was better back then,” he said. “There wasn’t as much ferry traffic and city folk weren’t telling us what to do and what not to do, what was cool and what’s not. There was less crime and we were largely unsupervised.”
Another Kingston resident, 82-year-old Lucille Weisenberger, taught school for 30 years at Wolfle Elementary and for five years before that in Little Boston.
“All those kids I taught up there are now elders,” she laughed.
Her parents moved to Kingston in 1922. There was no road to Hansville, just a wagon trail.
Getting into Kingston was a bit tricky, too. Although it had a road, people had to use what’s currently Barber Cutoff Road because it was more level.
“Everyone had horses and wagons,” she said. “When we went to get groceries we had to hitch up the wagons and it didn’t happen often.”
This Saturday between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., families can see what life was like riding in wagons to the grocery store.
Visit Weisenberger and Muhrlein at the historical society displays in Cleo’s Landing Learning Center for the Arts between 1 and 4 p.m.
