Duvall: A Transplant With Deep Roots

The town's early move to make way for the railroad set the tone for many changes as Duvall evolved from scrappy mill town to farm settlement to hippie haven to, now, a bedroom community.

When Arthur and Pauline Hix arrived in the Snoqualmie River Valley from Indiana in 1905 to build a little house and a general store, they found a fledgling village ready to become a town.

Already a Methodist church, a saloon and a tiny schoolhouse hugged the hillside above the waterway, serving the loggers working the surrounding foothills and the sparse population of homesteaders sowing their livings into the fertile valley soil.

Decades earlier, the first postmaster, Lucius Day, had been asked to name the hamlet. Legend has it he looked out the window onto an orchard, blooming snowy pink in a springtime meadow. And he declared, "Let's call it Cherry Valley."

But it wasn't to be. The railroad was coming. And Cherry Valley was right in the way.

So in winter 1909, the Hixes and the other townsfolk did the logical thing for the time: They picked up their buildings, loaded them on logging skids and braces, and for the next two months hauled them, intact, a half a mile south to a different history - a town called Duvall.

"Arthur Hix, Cherry Valley's pioneer merchant, has commenced moving his store farther south," the Monroe Monitor reported at the time. "The line of the railroad runs through the old store - in one side and out the other - but even with such excellent shipping facilities as would thus be afforded, Mr. Hix desires to move."

Eighty-nine years later, Duvall has grown from scrappy mill town to sleepy farm settlement, passed through a period as something of a haven for hippies and has ended up as a bedroom community for city-fleeing professionals, with subdivisions and businesses popping up like mushrooms.

But the pioneers who still live in the area remain fiercely loyal to the memory of Duvall as it was.

"The streets weren't level or anything, and my father didn't have a customer every day, but when he did it was usually a good one," remembers Velma Hix-Hill, the 84-year-old daughter of Arthur and Pauline Hix who still lives in the home the family hauled up the hill from Cherry Valley in 1910.

She was Duvall's postmaster from 1940 to 1976. Her parents' store still stands as Duvall Auto Parts at Main and Cherry streets.

Land homesteaded in 1871

James Duvall never actually lived in the city that bears his name.

He left for parts unknown in 1909, a year before the buildings of Cherry Valley were tugged up the hill to join the new ones being built in anticipation of the Great Northern and the Milwaukee railroads plowing through to deliver logs to the many riverside mills.

The city incorporated in 1913.

The land where Duvall sits today was homesteaded in 1871 by James Duvall's brother, Francis. But he sold it several years later, and it eventually ended up in the hands of the Port Blakely Mill.

But in 1887, James Duvall, who had been logging in the Everett area, bought the property and quickly moved his oxen to begin clearing the land. He became famous locally for building tough skids to slide timber into the river. The city streets were later built over them, and, as recently as 1988, some of the grease-coated, wooden slides sometimes poked out of the dirt along the side of Main Street.

In 1890 Duvall's wife, Annie, died soon after their fourth child was born. Looking for quick money to pay off his debts, Duvall set out for Arizona and later to the Yukon in search of gold.

There's no record that he found any. He returned to his land, sold it piece by piece in 1909, and left.

Duvall's departure didn't make a dent in the booming timber economy that would make his namesake thrive. There were trees to be had - big ones. And that meant men, lots of them, to cut them down and saw them up.

The Snoqualmie River was lined with mill after mill as the railroads hauled logs out of the hills and dumped them into the water.

Main Street bustled with businesses, including the impressive Forest Inn, a long, three-story hotel and saloon that overlooked the river about where the bridge over the river is today. It burned in 1930.

The roads weren't very good then. People still relied on riverboats to take them to Everett and the railroads to chug them out of town and deliver the mail. Both railroads operated their own depots then, the pair of them facing each other across the tracks as if challenging each other.

But the boom times disappeared as fast as the huge old-growth trees in the hills. When the logs were gone, sometime just before 1920, so were the loggers who came down out of the hills to do business in town. The local economy stagnated.

In 1920, 258 people lived in Duvall, U.S. census counts show. Ten years later, the population numbered 200. By 1950, still just 236 people called Duvall home.

Without the timber economy of the past, local merchants relied on the loyalty of the dairy farmers who grazed and milked their cows in the surrounding meadows.

"It wasn't the farmers who made the town, but it was the farmers who kept the town alive," said Bob Kosters, a 75-year-old retired dairyman who moved to the area in 1940.

Still, Duvall maintained its charm. The farmers dealt with bankers who knew their names and their land. The merchants sold on credit. Folks knew each other and life chugged along like the riverboats that better roads had made obsolete.

"You could drive through the town with a team of horses and pull over and get some ice cream," Kosters recalled. About 1960, developers started dividing land into tracts and city folks found affordable homes outside the urban bustle. The population jumped from 345 in 1960 to 607 in 1970.

Yet it was still an out-of-the-way, peaceful enough place that some 1960s "peaceniks" found rural bliss and stayed into the '70s. By 1980 the population was 729.

Then, with the boom in development on the Eastside, Duvall was discovered. By 1990, 2,770 people called Duvall home. Today the population is 4,238.

To old-timers like Kosters, things will never be the same.

"I loved to hear that old train whistle at night," he said.

"It used to be you'd see one car come through in a day. It's sad. Duvall's nothing big, but the history is very interesting."

Ian Ith's phone message number is 206-464-2109. His e-mail address is iith@seattletimes.com