After this area’s last Big Burn when logging slash and the moss of 10,000 years allowed fires to scorch the earth (my parents tell of being submerged in a stream with cloth over their faces, trying to breath). It left Bonhoeffer Gardens’ big stumps singed and blackened, a Village at Exit 215 held a dozen houses, supported an elementary school, the old church
chapel (existing and restored) and a speakeasy. All had fire damage. Steinbeck in his East of Eden said it well, “The church and the ‘saloon’ arrived in the Far West simultaneously. And each would have been horrified to think it was a different facet of the same thing. But surely, they were both intended to accomplish the same thing: the singing, the devotion, the poetry of the churches took a man out of his bleakness for a time …. ” Churchill to Truman in 1952; “The last time you and I sat across the conference table was at Potsdam, Mr. President. I must confess, Sir. I held you in very low regard then. I loathed your taking the place of Franklin Roosevelt. I misjudged you badly. Since that time, you, more than any other man, have saved Western Civilization.” That said, Freeborn Village was closed, and cabins burned in 1948, the land then burnt, along with dozens of saloons north of Seattle (14 in Bellingham, 13 in Fairhaven, …), thanks to the President Truman and his wife who championed the enforcement of the Mann Act. 1948, not that long ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mann_Act
https://klipsunmagazine.com/an-unspoken-past-761d15c8bb10
https://www.sahs-fncc.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/echoes41.pdf
https://www.plc215.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/A-Washington-State-History-Farm.pdf
https://www.plc215.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/2013-Conditional-Use-Permit-Narrative.pdf (page 37)
https://loscho.maps.arcgis.com/apps/PublicInformation/index.html?appid=d88679dd9d04410f806546b0d7f776f2
The person most responsible for closing houses of prostitution on the West Coast in 1947-1948 was:
Bess Truman
Winston Churchill
Franklin Roosevelt
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