Cabin is Bothell's first family home

Imagine that first year, May 1883: After arriving by boat from Seattle and homesteading 160 acres just north of what is now downtown Bothell, Andrew and Augusta Beckstrom, their children Anna, 2, and infant Carl, and Andrew's 72-year-old father, Olaf, had to find shelter and begin storing food for the winter.

Unfortunately, Andrew Beckstrom was a city boy from Smaland, Sweden, a painter by trade, and not much of a woodsman, his son John told The Seattle Times in 1960.

Luckily, the elderly Olaf Beckstrom was apparently skilled with an ax and a hoe and was able to build the family a 14-by-16-foot log cabin and plant a garden.

The cabin was on the verge of collapse until recently, when the Bothell Historical Society helped coordinate an effort to rebuild it, preserving Bothell's primitive past.

The Beckstrom starter home was moved to the Park at Bothell Landing in 1979. It had been sinking into the ground, the floor rotting and windows in need of replacement.

At a cost of $30,000, it was placed on a foundation last year and repaired so the community can see its settlers' spartan lifestyle.

The city, which owns the cabin and leases it to the Bothell Historical Museum, paid for about half of the restoration, with another $15,000 coming from King County. Beckstrom descendants paid for new windows.

The cabin was the 1885 birthplace of John Beckstrom, the first white child born in Bothell, according to Historical Society President Sue Kienast.

Built with thick, ancient tree trunks and square wooden nails, the cabin also had a table, chairs, small beds and rough chests crammed into its small space.

The family would live there for another 10 years, until a larger farmhouse was built. A lean-to was apparently added to the cabin to help accommodate the 10 Beckstrom children who had arrived by the mid-1890s, Kienast said.

The Beckstroms eventually would move into their farmhouse in 1895 and have 16 children.

While Andrew Beckstrom was establishing the local Swedish Lutheran church, the matriarch Augusta Beckstrom was the young Bothell community's nurse and doctor, according to the 1960 Times account.

Possessed of an old family medical book and good instincts, she set broken bones, bandaged wounds and tied severed arteries, all common afflictions in the logging trade.

The Beckstroms' rowboat was their lifeline to supplies in Seattle. It was stolen a year after they arrived, however, so they hiked overland on rudimentary trails to get medicine, tools and other supplies in the city.

Preserving the cabin's authenticity has been left to contractor Ron Loop, who used creative methods to ensure some historical accuracy.

To replace rotting boards in the flooring, he found some in an old chicken coop with grains matching those of the originals. He rusted some old horseshoe nails to resemble the original pegs and sandblasted and blowtorched a beam to age it. The cabin's restoration is betrayed only by its unavoidable new concrete foundation.

Augusta and Andrew Beckstrom's grandson, Rudolph Jr., still lives in Bothell. He remembers his grandmother, although she wasn't the conventional, candy-giving type, Beckstrom said. "She was a little tough."

Despite the ascetic life they led, Beckstrom said his father, aunts and uncles never complained about life as settlers, the hard manual labor, the lack of basic comforts.

"It's just the way it was; there was no sense griping about it," he said.

After the farmhouse was built, the cabin stored dynamite used to blow up tree stumps.

Beckstrom said he occasionally played in the cabin. "You could just go ahead and get your dynamite."

J. Patrick Coolican: 206-464-3315 or jcoolican@seattletimes.com.