Snohomish County’s Forest Glade Elementary School 75 years ago (this writer still can’t decide between a belt or suspenders), built in a “forest glade” that 75 years before served as an Indigenous agricultural site.  Located on a plateau above a Woods Creek’s wetlands with a SW facing sloping hill, the glade hosted Camas and American carrots (on the hillside), and Wapato (in the swamp). In addition, you’d find hazelnuts and crabapples and perhaps a few Oaks and Chinquapins, the former in “forest groves.”  Some of my boyhood playmate’s (one to my left in the photo) ancestors lived there then, now 2 x 75 = 150 years ago.  They might have lived there 750 years, perhaps 7,500 years, slowly improving the land’s productivity.  Plants without formal tending create medicine and fertilizer with their decaying leaves, improving the ground specific to that plant’s needs, e.g. Indigenous Crabapple forests still exist – see the next Forest Grove lesson.  Now part of the Snohomish School District, this rural school was closed in the 1950s and a bus provided an hour-long ride to join the always better dressed “city kids.” Other rural Snohomish schools (6 columns of desks, 6 grades of students shown in the photo) were Machias, Swans Trail, Roosevelt, Cathcart, Maltby … the Stanwood rural schools within walking distance of the History Farm were Midway, Victoria, and Freeborn.  The writer’s father’s school, Midway’s (Starbird Road to Milltown at the intersection with Buhl Road) debris are buried under a very visible dirt mound at the NW corner.  When small rural schools were closed, many Indigenous students’ parents elected not to put their children on buses. A Mount Vernon church’s vacation bible school recently reported over 100 students’ languages and dialects, most with Spanish as the second language, and English, if any, as a third.  In the last few years, 10 million immigrants from the mountains and valleys of Central America have crossed borders to live in US sanctuary cities and rural areas.  These hard-working people favor large families, very few are Spanish, and many speak an Indigenous language.  Native families may begin at the age of 15 and it takes but 5 generations to reach 75 years.  Someday soon, one-half the US population may boast Native American DNA.  We may call them Hispanics in this voting democracy where winning counts, many will be “native,” all of us brothers and sisters with ancestors from a time when the Earth’s population constricted to (estimated) 1,000 people 30,000 years ago.  When we played “Cowboys and Indians,” Harry was often the “cowboy,” who always “won.”  Might that not be the future for the U.S.?

https://www.historylink.org/File/22909
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-021-00141-7
https://snocoheritage.org/Origin%20_%20History%20of%20School%20Dists.pdf
https://burkeherbarium.org/imagecollection/taxon.php?Taxon=Daucus%20pusillus

ps.  There is a future US Navy Admiral standing in the above photo (and Cathy, his sister to Harry’s left, reader’s right).

Question: City kids were different because they had better…

acorns
parents
clothes

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