The Archives May 2017

A new historical special section presented by the Lynden Tribune and Ferndale Record.

The Archives

Wednesday, May 3, 2017

Historic Homes & Families Edition

Featuring

The Berg homestead near Everson provides a window into the past .........................C2 The Elenbaas family has left an indelible mark on the Lynden community .............C6

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A picturesque home, well preserved

Built in 1905 and 1910, the Berg homestead house east of Everson has been meticulously restored by recent owners to pristine condition. (Elisa Claassen/Lynden Tribune)

A tour through what long ago was the Berg homestead at Tuxedo

By Elisa Claassen for the Lynden Tribune

WHATCOM — Tuxedo and The Crossing. The names don’t show up on county maps, maybe not even of 100 years ago. According to local historian Jim Berg, a retired

appraiser, the area east from “The Crossing” (or “Upper Crossing”) was known as Tuxedo. The general area became the Everson townsite after the railroad established a depot on Ever Everson’s homestead in 1890. The Crossing, just west of presentday Everson, was the place where the native Indians, and then early settlers, ferried across the Nooksack River. It was their link in overland travel from Bellingham Bay to the Fraser River in Canada.

The Treaty of 1854, according to Berg’s writings, declared that all tribal members

were to move to a reservation, which locally would be the Lummi one. The Nooksack tribe was not recognized. “However, the Indians that inhabited the area where Tuxedo was located were used to a river environment, so did not adapt to the saltwater environment of the reservation. So they moved back to what was familiar in violation of the treaty. Most of the natives had their homes on the river, as that was their primary food source.”

Three men settled inland on what are now Sumas River and Breckenridge Creek:

Indian Antone, Indian Charlie and School George. They were the first known residents of the Tuxedo spot. The first white settler in that area was James Bell from San Francisco in 1878. Samuel Berg, one of Jim Berg’s ancestors, arrived in 1883. The local post office was a room in his home, and he called the place Tuxedo.

Historylink.org states that Tuxedo was no longer considered a town by 1895. The post office had closed. C. Stewart Kale built a shingle mill nearby. (Kale later was noted for orchards and berries, and it was the

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The main house has been supplemented by two cabins, and a classic red barn is also on the property. (Elisa Claassen/Lynden Tribune) name of an Everson canning company.)

A picturesque home Hallmark couldn’t have created a prettier setting for a home than the one at 3315 South Pass Rd. in one-time Tuxedo. The wooden sign at the start of a tree-lined drive depicts the house, which has been owned

by Jerry and Judy Toon since summer 1999.

Once it was the Berg family homestead and then played host to the Pike, Goodwin and Wiggins families successively.

Sumas River and Swift Creek go through the property. A “beach” has been created along the shoreline with room for children to play, a horseshoe pit, and picnic tables beyond. A “Welcome” sign is at the top of a short stairway from the lawn.

Assessor’s records list the 1,680-square-foot two-story home as built in 1905. From his research, Jim has determined a “new house” was constructed in 1910, a year before his Aunt Charlotte was born. An enlarged old black-and-white photo, hanging in the middle of the Everson Library, shows the home in early days after its original version was rolled 100 feet on logs and a two-story part was added to it. Jim points to the two types of siding on the house — lap and tongue-and-groove — showing the old versus the new sections.

Both are covered in yellow paint.

It also has a former milk house, silo,

barn, root cellar, hen house, and garage with a shop. Former owners Dave and Alice Wiggins bought two cabins — rescued and relocated from Birch Bay. One, the Sunflower, is surrounded by a white picket fence and garden closer to the home. A larger room for couches and a kitchenette show doors to a restroom and bedroom in the back.

The Toons had a bed-and-breakfast license for their first seven years of ownership, but did not market it extensively, Jerry said. He points to the big red barn and said a number of wedding and engagement pictures have been taken in that rustic setting by the young couples.

The Bergs A large two-ton green olivine stone monument sits atop the higher section of Nooksack Cemetery on Breckenridge Road where the older graves are. “Berg” is in big print on the front. Currently, 16 small metal plaques are on the back with individual names. There is room for 36 plaques.

Jim Berg and his surviving sister Barb (Berg) Funk installed the stone about four years ago from a vendor on the Mt. Baker Highway. The stone had been mined from the nearby Twin Sisters. A crane positioned it amidst the older monuments to enable the family to add more recent burials of cremains to the family plot.

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On a following Memorial Day, Berg found a note left by someone who thought the new stone was too large — and “too arrogant.” Answering, Jim notes that the Bergs were not only one of the area’s founding families but also founders of the Nooksack Cemetery. Jim’s great-grandfather Samuel Berg, who died in 1890, left sons John and Jake to watch over the cemetery as sextons for years, maintaining the grounds.

Jim, who appraised property in Whatcom County for 50 years, has a handdrawn map of the layout of the original Berg brothers’ adjoining homesteads: Fred, Jake, Dave and John. As we drive from the Everson Library along Main Street, we pass the Christ Fellowship Church (formerly Nooksack Valley Baptist). Jim points that this was about a boundary of Fred’s homestead. “It’s quite a bit of land,” he said, turning south along Highway 9 after the railroad.

Both the railroad and the road go through what was the Berg homestead.

Property was given, not sold, to allow both to be built, he said.

A large homestead Some of the earliest homes were meant for bachelors and weren’t much more than simple cabins, maybe 10 feet by 10 feet. Many are now gone or were moved for other uses. John Berg’s home, once on Oat Coles Road, is gone. Jim said that the more rural area had bears rubbing their backs against the structures.

Jim Berg (upper right photo) takes a deep interest in the history of his family’s arrival at what was first called Tuxedo in 1883, forerunner of the city of Everson. (Elisa Claassen/Lynden Tribune)

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Samuel Berg also established the Nooksack Cemetery on Breckenridge Road, and two of his four sons became its first sextons. (Elisa Claassen/Lynden Tribune) Fred, who married the former Carrie Saar of Sumas, moved to Idaho in 1909 a month after burying his daughter Esther Belle at the Nooksack Cemetery. Respiratory issues caused him to seek another drier climate.

We look through fields to what would have constituted boundaries of past property and turn east on Massey Road. This was Dave and John Berg’s driveway before it became a road. Jim moved his family to the property in 1977. He had found a home at Eighth and Front streets in Lynden and removed a breakfast room and gables to make the move to Nooksack. One of his

sons currently owns the Massey property, with Jim having a life estate. Another son and his family live next door in the latest version of a home once owned by Dave Berg.

Jim points to a tarp covering what was once the original home, now turned into a garage.

We drive back through the tree-lined drive onto Massey and then Oat Coles where Jim points out more Berg and Sorenson homes before coming to the Berg Road which is adjacent to the creek, with a view of Tuxedo House in sight.

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Elenbaas family made an imprint on Lynden

What began in 1919 as a car company of Elenbaas brothers Ike, Herman and Peter evolved into a dairy equipment business in the south 600 block of Front Street, Lynden. (Courtesy photo/Lynden Pioneer Museum)

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Brothers Ike and Herman introduced refrigerated milk tanks

By Calvin Bratt editor@lyndentribune.com

LYNDEN ­— The family of James and Maria Elenbaas came to Lynden around 1900 looking for a better life than they had known either in the Netherlands or in Michigan. It was difficult at first carving out a farm and a living on 52 acres of recently cleared-off stump land on Van Dyk Road. But through time, enterprise and the achievements of descendants, the Elenbaas name gained a solid place on the Whatcom County landscape.

There were nine children in the original family, of which six grew to adulthood or stayed local. The mother, a daughter and a son all died in 1906.

Herman Elenbaas was fourth in age order, born in 1885. Because all the children had been pressed into work duty at an early age to support the family, Herman received only about five years of grade school education, wrote his son John in a family tree paper in 1973.

But “his wisdom was highly valued,” as Herman would go on to serve on the Lynden Christian School board, on the Lynden City Council and later on the Calvin College board of trustees for six years.

He was a force in the founding of the Christian Rest Home [today’s Christian Health Care Center] in 1955-56.

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Although still showing the name Lynden Motor Co., a truck full of milk cans can be seen arriving at the spot where the Elenbaas brothers were building a dairy processing business in the 1930s. (Courtesy photo/Lynden Pioneer Museum) Dairying business And in business the Elenbaas brothers Isaac (Ike), Herman and Peter would become well known for their partnership in developing refrigerated bulk milk holding tanks for local dairy farms. The brothers started a milk-receiving creamery in 1933, and manager Herman, who had earlier managed the Lynden Cooperative Creamery, was adamant in his conviction that there would be no milk pickup on Sundays.

“The original idea was to enable keeping the milk so that trucks would not have to pick up milk cans on Sunday,” wrote Lynden Tribune editor Bill Lewis at Herman’s death in spring 1976. “From Mr. Elenbaas’ inventive mind came a patent for a milk tank cleaner which has been sold all over the world and is still manufactured in Lynden.”

The creamery business, based in the south 600 block of Front Street [Dutch Village Mall today] grew to take over the Lynden Motor Co. garage the brothers had bought into in 1919. It added branches in Sumas and Everson and at its peak employed about 60 workers and churned over a million pounds of butter a year, according to the John Elenbaas memoirs.

In 1958 Herman also started the Elenbaas

Dairy Supply Co. Dairy products made also included ice cream, whey and milk powder.

As consolidation came to the dairy industry, the Lynden Dairy Products operation was transferred to the growing Whatcom County Dairymen’s Association [eventually to be part of Darigold], “with the stipulation that no worker or shipper be required to compromise his Sunday convictions,” John wrote.

Grandson Doug Bulthuis of Lynden recalls painting the back of the Front Street building in the late 1960s when the milk tank washers were still being manufactured there.

Herman a quiet force He remembers his grandpa Elenbaas especially for his humility. “He didn’t want to do anything for show,” Bulthuis said.

The way a generation or two thought of Lynden Dairy was as a popular place to get milkshakes and soda drinks, making it also a hangout for teens. Someone once wrote a reflection, now in Bulthuis’s hands, of how Herman Elenbaas handled the antics of a group of youths that got a little out of hand and resulted in the shattering of a stack of tall, heavy soda glasses. Shards of glass flew everywhere.

The businessman who was a quiet but revered presence in town watched as the teens scrambled to clean up their mess. Then he calmly walked over to their gathering and said, “Can you make a little room for me so I can sit with you?”

They did, and as all sat in an uncertain silence, these were the thoughts of one witness, written years later: “He was one of those adults against whom no adolescent could have any complaint.

He did not fit into the category of adults who might represent oppressive authority. Nor was he one of those adults who appeared to adolescents like thorny pil-

lars of righteousness. He did not represent the oppressive rich even though he probably had more money than any of our families.” “... This man seated in our crowded booth had the usual little twinkle in his eyes and the slight suggestion of a smile on his lips as he looked around that miserable circle of miscreants. He spoke: ‘Boys, don’t you think it is time that you grow up?’”

Inwardly, all of them agreed, and felt deeply ashamed. “And we never again misbehaved in the dairy.”

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Hanover, a teacher in the new Lynden Christian School, and they moved into a new home they had built at 114 South Tenth St. It still stands today.

the machinery running, that’s for sure.”

He developed a field digger that could be used to dig up rows of daffodils before the bulb industry moved from the Lynden area to Skagit County.

She also remembers that she and “all the children learned to wrap butter,” as Lynden was trying to meet the demand for butter in Seattle, Vancouver, B.C., and elsewhere.

Bernice and her cousins Serena and Winifred, all last name Elenbaas, were in the same grade and in Mr. Fred Rockey’s home room together in high school and, as roll call and seating were all alphabetical, they were always associated together.

It carried on, as the three often hiked in the mountains together too.

Bernice was getting her master’s degree at Clark University in Massachusetts, after a bachelor’s at Western, when Lynden schools superintendent William Fisher called to say there was an opening.

She got it, in the mid-1940s, and stayed for 33 years in all as a grade school teacher and principal.

In the one year Bernice had to shift down to teach third grade (because of a levy failure), she had a student named Becky Van Dalen. Becky Midboe is now the principal of the Lynden elementary school named after Bernice Vossbeck.

Others of family Isaac Elenbaas was the expert machinist for the Lynden Dairy Products company. He and his family — including daughter Bernice Vossbeck, for whom a Lynden school is named — lived just a few steps away at the corner of Seventh and Judson streets. Vossbeck, who just celebrated her 94th birthday on April 20, remains in the family home at 700 Judson where she was born.

When the milk processing portion of the Elenbaas company was sold, the bulk milk equipment and feed operations were kept. Elenbaas Dairy Supply was continued by its employees in Lynden for a number of years while the Elenbaas Company and EPL Feed continue in the Sumas and Everson areas, run by Peter descendants.

Bernice Vossbeck remembers that her father Ike and uncles Herman and Peter started out with a motor car company and turned it into a dairy products and equipment company.

Of her father as machinist, she said, “Yes, he was very, very good. He kept all

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Bernice Elenbaas Vossbeck was born in the house at 700 Judson St. in which she still lives at age 94. (Calvin Bratt/Lynden Tribune