Chronicler captures Coupeville’s captivating citizens

By KATE POSS

Special to the News-Times

Recording of Coupeville’s local stories are what sparks Judy Lynn’s fire.

“Corralling history has been a passion of mine,” she recently said while sitting at the Crabby Coffee on Front Street.

She’s recorded and transcribed tales of Coupeville locals past and present, whose stories are published in e-book format. Since its publication ten years ago, she has collected more than 50 additional stories that will be added in an updated edition.

Published in 2015 with more than a hundred interviews, “Front Street Coupeville: An Oral History,” by Judy Lynn, includes conversations recorded and transcribed that tell of the town’s colorful, hard-won and thrilling history. Proceeds benefit the Island County Historical Museum.

The book is available on Amazon, downloadable to compatible devices, and searchable. It is also available for listening at the Coupeville Library, part of the Sno-Isle Libraries system.

Years prior to the publication of the e-book, Lynn began recording and transcribing stories for various families’ own use.

One of her early oral history requests came by way of a quilter friend — Lynn was a part of the fiber arts community for years — who asked for an interview of her father living on Mercer Island at the time.

“He had a picture of Pancho Villa in a bathing suit,” Lynn recalled.

Lynn self-published another oral family history for her partner of 20 years, Val Arnold, who died of brain cancer 19 years ago.

“The most important thing for her was oral history, long before I got started,” Lynn said. “I’m following in her footsteps.”

Arnold, a fourth-generation Coupeville resident, never outgrew her love of farming and driving John Deere tractors. Arnold also served as president of a number of organizations, and was a founding member of the Coupeville Arts Center. Her father Chuck Arnold was born in 1916, married and raised his family at the farm on Arnold Road where Chuck grew up. He lived there for 89 years. The Arnold family story is recalled in Lynn’s self-published book, “Charles Arnold Remembers: Growing Up in San de Fuca.”

Since moving to Coupeville with a pair of children in the 1980s, starting a number of businesses and helping to found the Coupeville Arts Center, Lynn was and is a magnet for attracting and writing others’ stories.

“I left the Arts Center in 1999, and started another business, Consider it Done, and worked as a professional organizer,” Lynn recalled. “During that time I also started doing oral histories.”

Seeds for the eventual creation of “Front Street Coupeville” were planted while Lynn helped a local couple downsize their estate with her Consider it Done business.

Rose and Mahlon Brosseau — she was a nurse at Seattle Children’s Hospital and Mahlon was a director of news photography at KOMO TV before moving to Coupeville — once ran the Six Persimmons restaurant and gift shop on Front Street during the 1970s.

Rose’s story — as recorded by Lynn — tells of opening their Chinese restaurant and being asked a year later to host Chinese cooking classes. At first local grocers did not stock the Asian vegetables she required. The grocers sent their produce staff to take Rose’s cooking classes and, later, began stocking the veggies she used in her restaurant.

In their retirement years later, Rose hired Lynn to organize the couple’s move to assisted living at Maple Ridge in Freeland. Lynn became fascinated by the couple’s story, which is published in “Front Street Coupeville,” and thought she’d like to compile other such interesting stories in book form.

In the story about Rose, Lynn notes, “Rose Brosseau died on November 23, 2008, just seven days after this interview.”

Lynn also interviewed Ken Pickard, who was instrumental in creating Ebey’s Landing National Historical Reserve. In the interview, Pickard explained that he lived in Coupeville most of his life. His paternal grandparents and parents owned the Prairie Center Mercantile general store, which later became the current Prairie Center Market.

When a developer proposed building 240 townhomes on Keystone Spit back in the 70s, locals protested en masse, wishing to preserve Ebey’s Landing. Incensed that Island County commissioners approved the project in the face of overwhelming public opposition, Pickard determined he would earn a law degree and fight the project.

Appalled that the prairie could be ruined by unscrupulous developers, Pickard and others formed Friends of Ebey’s, which raised money and hired a top environmental lawyer, Ken’s former law professor. The group challenged the builder, which, in Pickard’s words, “led to a huge, horrible 10 years of fighting and animosity and hatred and all kinds of hell.”

Through numerous lawsuits and nonstop lobbying of state lawmakers, the land was preserved, marking it as the first national historical reserve in the country.

Another notable character, whose transcript is a part of the museum’s collections of oral histories, is Mary Fullington, who believed women weren’t given enough credit for their accomplishments in Coupeville’s early days.

Clara Burns, collections manager and archivist with the Island County Historical Society Museum and Archives, emailed a number of photos from the museum archives featuring some of Coupeville’s women of note.

From the webpage “Voices of Ebey’s Reserve,” we learn that “Walalita Slapoose was born in a village near Coupeville in the early 1830s. Despite being nearly blind, she was renowned for her weaving skills and sold baskets, bags, and other textiles to the white settlers. Traditionally, thread was twisted from duck downs, cedar bark, and wooly dog hair. The threads were dyed with natural pigments derived from Oregon grape, sea cactus, hemlock, and elder and wild currents. In the early 19th century sheep were introduced to the island and the production of textiles shifted away from traditional thread to favor sheep wool.”

An interview with Fullington took place in the early 1990s – she died in 1993 – with Lynn asking questions. Historian/author Theresa Trebon corrects the factual errors in the document, while Fullington’s irascible character gives the transcript its color.

Fullington’s first words criticize Coupeville’s then-recorded history, saying its focus was on buildings and white men. Credit belonged, she asserts, to the Lower Skagit Indigenous women who married some of the white settlers and to the white women who arrived and got things done.

“Iron women is really what they were, iron women,” Fullington told Lynn, saying she coined the term herself to describe the strong-willed women of early Coupeville. “And they correspond to the Indians’ Copper Women.”

Copper Women, Fullington claimed, were indigenous women of Washington state who belonged to a council.

“I would like to have it show that the culture of Coupeville is not shown. In the beginning … it was due to the women that lived here that Coupeville was considered a cultural community. Well it begins (before the white men) … with the Indian women here once and there were wonderful Indian women … and a lot of these Indian women meant a great deal to the community,” the transcript notes.

During the interviews, Fullington told Lynn she can express things better than she: “The community would never have been what it became, a cultural center for Puget Sound, if it had not been for the women. I think that’s plain. But I haven’t expressed it, you can express it much better.”

“Oh, you express it really well,” Lynn replied.