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BLAKELY ISLAND, SAN JUAN ARCHIPELAGO, WASHINGTON detail from USCGS #6300 Click image to enlarge; not up to date for navigation. |
"Where homesteaders cleared fields amid the dense vegetation of Blakely Island in the San Juan Islands and loggers hewed timber for a sawmill on Thatcher Bay, strange things have come to pass.
Floyd Johnson's aviation-and-yachting estates' development, consisting of 38 summer homes, some of startingly advanced design, rose on the north shore of the 4,700-acre island. Almost all of the remainder, by arrangement with a mill company on the mainland, has become a perpetual tree farm.
Decaying log buildings left by the earlier residents are regarded as picturesque curiosities, to be visited by Jeep, the characteristic vehicle encountered on Blakely's rugged roads. Nearly every home has one.
Johnson's airfield and improvements were commenced in 1956 and each winter he added more buildings. Some of the estate owners use their private planes.
Except for the colony at the north end, Blakely has gone back to its natural state, with 2,500 deer roaming the woods, mink, muskrat, beaver, and land otters living near the two lakes; bald eagles, doves, goldfinches, woodpeckers, and swarms of other birds flitting among the trees.
Johnson's enterprise controls all but a federal government lighthouse reservation and two other tracts. Seven permanent families live on Blakely, employed mostly in the development. Houses and boats are constructed in slack seasons. Children are taken across to Orcas Island by private boat to attend school. In rough weather, they are flown across.
One of the earliest mentions of inhabitants on Blakely was in the 1870 census, which listed the sole occupant as Paul K. Hubbs Jr. and his then-wife, Sasha (he had several.) Hubbs, a leading figure in the San Juan 'Pig War,' had been granted 'the exclusive privilege to an island about five square miles' (the size was considerably under-rated" and grazed 400 sheep on it.
Ten years later, when the next census was taken, Hubbs was temporarily without a wife; his occupation was given as fishing.
By that time, there were other settlers. E.C. Gillette, who surveyed land for the Americans on San Juan before the 'Pig War', went to Blakely in 1874, and raised sheep on the southeast side. He was the first San Juan County surveyor and later became county school superintendent.
H.W. Whitener moved to the northwest side of the island from Samish Island in the early 1870s. He was elected sheriff of San Juan County.
William H. Viereck and a partner named Coffelt, of Orcas Island, started a sawmill on Thatcher Bay; in 1889, Theodore W. S. Spencer deputy customs collector at Roche Harbor, moved his family from Lopez to a homestead at Spencer Lake. He was attracted by the possibilities of water power, as the outlet was through a steep gulch. In 1892, he purchased the mill and box factory, which the family operated almost continuously until 1945.
Ruins of the mill, wharf, boathouse, post office, commissary, and several dwellings of the mill community can be seen at the head of Thatcher Bay (1961.)
Blakely has a log schoolhouse, constructed in the 1880s and used continuously until 1940. Johnson hopes to restore it.
A teacher at the school, R.H. Straub, was the central figure in San Juan County's most celebrated criminal case, resulting in the only hanging in its history.
Ray Spencer, now of Spencer Spit, Lopez Island, who spent the greater part of his life on Blakely, said Straub bought the Gillette place, which joined the homestead of Mrs. Pauline Burns, extending inland from the southwest side of the island. Mrs. Burns was the wife of a railroad man who was away most of the time.
August 30, 1895, her brother, Leon Lanterman, and their half-brother, Ralph W. Blythe, went from Decauter to dig her potato crop. In the next field, Irving Parberry, a youth of 17 whose family was homesteading near Horseshoe Lake, was noisily at work singing and whistling, seeming determined to attract attention. As Straub had appeared, Lanterman, Blythe, and Mrs. Burns became suspicious.
Straub was a Canadian, about 45, who had been in San Juan County on and off since 1872. About three years earlier, it was suspected that he was stripping the small freight steamship, J.C. BRITAIN after it was stranded at Bell Rock. Suspicious neighbors followed him to Blakely Island, where he pulled a rifle from his boat and threatened them.
Hard feelings arose from this incident and both Mrs. Spencer and Mrs. Burns were school board members who opposed retaining Straub as teacher.
Mrs. Burns now feared Straub's intentions as he appeared near the potato field. Lanterman walked over to the fence on the pretext of talking with Parberry about land clearing. The boy's replies were abusive and Blythe, hearing the shouting, went to investigate. Parberry had both an ax and a rifle and Blythe arrived in time to see the youth strike Lanterman with the former weapon.
At that instant, Straub came out of hiding, leaped on a log, cursed Lanterman, and fired at him. He turned on Blythe, but the latter dropped and the bullet passed over him. Blythe raced to the Burns house for a weapon and Straub, still firing, went after Mrs. Burns. A bullet entered her shoulder and another whizzed past her ear.
In the time Blythe found a weapon, the two assailants had disappeared, but not until Straub shot twice more at Lanterman, killing him.
Mrs. Burns ran a mile through the timber to the Spencer home and gave the alarm. She was taken by the Spencers in a small boat to her parent's home and Blythe was picked up on the way.
Straub fled to Whatcom County and Parberry to another part of the San Juans. Both were tracked down, Sheriff Newton Jones serving a warrant on Straub 2 October.
Lanterman was buried on Lopez, 1 September.
Parberry, when captured, insisted that Straub had forced him at the point of a revolver to participate in the attack.
At a preliminary hearing in Friday Harbor, several residents of Decatur and Lopez Islands openly threatened to lynch Straub if they could get their hands on him.
The case went to trial in October. Lacking a fitting room in the San Juan County courthouse, the authorities arranged for the use of the ground floor of Friday Harbor's Odd Fellows Hall. The judge was seated on the stage and the main floor was roped off to separate the jury from witnesses and spectators. There was no room to which the jurors could retire in intermissions.
Straub had been locked in the jail in Whatcom until the day of the trial. He moved for a change of venue, contending he would not receive fair treatment in San Juan County because of strong prejudice had been created by Mr. Dillon's funeral sermon.
Change of venue was denied,, and the trial proceeded. Parberry turned state's evidence and the charge against him was dismissed.
Edward Ambler, one of the state's witnesses, created a diversion by eavesdropping under the stage beneath the witness chair. The attorney for the defense routed him out.
The jury was hung for seven hours because two members opposed capital punishment and could not agree with the rest as to the degree of murder. At length, on 26 October, the prisoner was found guilty in the first degree and sentenced to execution on 13 November.
Straub appealed, so back he went to the Whatcom jail. A long wait was in store for him, during which he 'got religion.'
It was more than a year, 8 December 1896, before the Supreme Court affirmed the judgment of the District Court. The hanging was set for 26 March 1897. Straub gained another respite, until 22 April; his sister made a last-minute personal appeal to Governor Rogers to save Straub from the gallows, which Sheriff Jones had erected inside a 12 x 15-foot enclosure at one end of the jail. Islanders were ashamed of what was about to happen, and the judge offered a 15-foot-high fence built around the gallows.
About 20 persons were admitted to the hanging. The sheriff delayed the fatal hour Straub asked if there was anything he wished to say, spoke in calm tones for ten minutes. He declared that if nothing but the truth had been told, he would not have been condemned. He thanked Salvation Army friends for converting him while he was in jail and said since then he had felt better than in all his life.
Sheriff Newton Jones carried out his unpleasant task and, it is said, was so upset by the execution, that he shortly afterward had a nervous breakdown.
No one lives today on either the Burns or the Lanterman property. The buildings and fences have disappeared on the former land. The Lanterman house on Decatur was burned a few years ago.
Words by historian Lucile McDonald for The Seattle Times published,
13 August 1961.
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