Skagit River Journal

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Noel V. Bourasaw, founder Sedro-Woolley, Washington, 98284 Home of the Tarheel Stomp Mortimer Cook slept here & named the town Bug
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Samuel Simpson Tingley,
his pioneer Skagit family

This ferry crossed the south fork of the Skagit River, back and forth between Conway and Mann's Landing, which was later renamed Fir. This is the kind of ferry that Samuel S. Tingley maintained and built. Photo by the late Art Hupy.

Part 2 of 2: Samuel, Maria and family settle on the north fork of the Skagit
The 1906 Illustrated History states that Samuel Tingley actually arrived on Puget Sound on the ship, George Washington (there is no mention of Maria), and that he soon found work at the shipyards of Port Orchard in Kitsap County. [See Update below.] The biography continues, "In 1867 Mr. Tingley went to the mouth of the Skagit River, on the south side of the north fork, and took up a claim. Messrs. Abbott and Sartwell were the only men on the south fork at that time, though up by La Conner were Mike Sullivan and Sam Calhoun, both of whom had some land diked in. Mr. Tingley went to diking, soon had a small farm in cultivation, and lived there until, in 1879, the Ruby Creek excitement lured him away."
Author Tom Robinson is completing a book about western Skagit County history and he has traced the location of Samuel's homestead: "I know that his farm was on Fir Island out where the Rawlins Road leads west, which means the farm would have been on the North Fork and near its mouth." If you visited the old fishing village of Fishtown in the 1960s-1980s, that spot was at the end of present-day Rawlins Road, and you will find several drainage ditches out there that are the present incarnations of what Samuel and neighbors dug out with arduous labor, using picks and shovels. (Fishtown will be one of the features of a future issue.)
By 1870, several other settlers had moved into the Tingley neighborhood. In an interview for the 1906 Illustrated History book, Thomas P. Hastie Jr. recalled that he and Samuel lived near Franklyn Buck, DeWitt Clinton Dennison, Bus Lill, Samuel S. Tingley, Magnus Anderson, William Brown, Joseph L. Maddox, Thomas R. Jones, Peter Vander Kuyl, Moses Kane, John Guinea, Quinby Clark, [unknown first] Fay, T.J. Rawlins and Charles Henry. The 1906 Illustrated History also explains:

We have already seen that the first cabin in that neighborhood [on the south fork of the Skagit] was built by W.H. Sartwell, who assisted in the work by Orrin Kincaid and Mr. Todd. The three men soon formed a partnership and established in the cabin a trading post for the purpose of exchanging goods and merchandise with the Indians for furs. The difficulty of purchasing goods, however, by reason of the exorbitant charges of the wholesalers at Seattle and Olympia, who wished to monopolize the Indian trade themselves, rendered this first mercantile venture on the Skagit unprofitable, and soon after Mr. Kincaid went to California. In the meantime, Mr. Todd died and for some time Sartwell was alone on that immediate portion of the river

Maria Tingley gave birth to their first child, Ida Sophia Tingley, in February 1869. Just over a year later, their first son, Oliver Brown Tingley, was born on May 16, 1870. And there lies another mystery. The family has long contended that Oliver was the first white child born to parents along the river, as have regional historians. If that is true, where was Ida born? The answer is in Volume 2 of the Family Record. Although that volume gives an incorrect birth date, her place of birth was recorded as Coupeville, on Whidbey Island, the town where many Northwest settlers gathered during periodic Indian threats and during the wintertime.

Other Tingleys move out from Maine The Tingley Family series of books has been most helpful in filling in the gap of the 1870s, which is not covered in any of our other sources. For instance, we now know that other members of Samuel's nuclear family joined him and his wife in the Skagit Valley. For instance, the family book shows Zena A. Tingley being Samuel's younger sister, born back East in 1849, the fourth child of John and Sophia Tingley. The 1906 Illustrated History lists her main claim to fame as the first teacher in a subscription school at William Sartwell's original log cabin on the south fork in 1872. She taught seven pupils and the book ntoes that there were apparently no other schools on the mainland of the Skagit Valley before that time. The story goes on to note that Zena later became Mrs. J.H. Moores. That is apparently an error. Pioneer James H. Moores, who is noted as the first commercial fisherman on the Skagit River, had two wives and according to his biography elsewhere in the book, neither one was Zena. That same biography does note, however that he was also from New Brunswick and that he was the third of 13 children. The book lists several other Mooreses who also migrated to Skagit and Snohomish counties, so perhaps she was married to one of them.
Freeman Calvin Tingley was the next child after Zena and he also came west to the Skagit Valley, maybe at the same time that Zena did, before 1972. He was a farmer and logger and he lived here until at least Nov. 5, 1881, when he was married to Elizabeth Jane Wilkins by the famous pioneer Baptist minister, B.N.L. Davis of Mount Vernon. Elizabeth Jane divorced him in 1899 because he left her with 8 children with no means of support and went off logging on Camano Island, then moved to British Columbia. The Family Record does not record any information for his second wife, except that her name was Rose and that they had two children together, one of whom died in infancy. He died in Quesnel, B. C., on Oct. 2, 1926, at age 76, and was survived by his third wife, Bertha (Litke), who was 36 years younger.
Freeman was not quite as religious as Samuel. According to the Family Record, he talked about his 16 children by three wives so much, "perhaps too often — an old timer came forth with what he thought would be a very appropriate way of avoiding any confusion between the two Freemans. He called him 'Stud'. Mr. Tingley took it good naturedly and forever after was referred to as 'Stud', by the old timers. Like most Tingleys, Stud was a lively man and very musical. He was always ready to get out his accordion for a dance or just to have fun and raise a bit of life, stomping his feet and yelling out the whoopees."
Samuel's parents also moved out to the valley permanently, but we do not know when, maybe about the time Freeman and Zena joined Samuel. The Family Record only records their death dates and place. Sophia died in Skagit County, with no city listed, on Dec. 27, 1879. John Calvin Tingley died of "old age" on Aug. 2, 1891, and Skagit City was listed as the place. Skagit City was sometimes listed for locations from that town at the forks of the river, all the way out the north fork, so they may have remained on Samuel's original homestead for the rest of their lives. There is no record of any of the other siblings joining Samuel here; Mathilda Jane, his younger sister, died in New Brunswick, where her husband was a farmer.
Maria's death in 1874 is a bit of a mystery. The Family Record notes that she died by drowning, as did her unnamed infant son, in March 1874. Clarice Tingley was told by an unnamed son from Samuel's second marriage that she died, possibly in a flood, before the infant was born. We checked in the Illustrated History and did not find any evidence of a major flood that spring. Sudden rises in the river during that time of year were usually called "spring freshets." Perhaps the family was traveling east to the trading post at the forks; Skagit City rose as a town there in 1876. Or maybe they were on their way to Mann's Landing, which became the town of Fir on the south fork. Again, we suppose that the lack of substantiation could be due to Samuel's later deference to his second wife. After Maria's death, he apparently continued diking around his farm and raising crops on the land at sea level that decades before was often covered by a thin layer of salt.

Samuel marries again and we learn about the Knapp family

This photo of a Timothy hay harvest on the Charles Elde farm shows the bounty that resulted from farms cleared and diked by hand on Fir Island. It also shows the haystacks ready for loading onto wagons drawn by horses, the method used before steam threshers were introduced to the valley. Photo by Asahel Curtis, courtesy of the book, Skagit Settlers, reprints of which are for sale at the LaConner Museum.

We can only imagine how difficult Samuel's challenge must have been, caring for two toddlers after his wife died. We know that he did not wait long to take on another wife. According to the family record, on Oct. 25, 1876, Samuel married Elizabeth Mahaley (Knapp) Taylor. Again the record is very slim about her background, including how and where they met. We are given one hint in the family record, with the notation that they were married by Rev. Daniel Bagley, the holiest of the holies in establishment Seattle, and at his home, to boot.
The Illustrated History also tells us that she was the daughter of Dr. Herman and Elizabeth (Easterbrook) Knapp, of Pennsylvania and that she was born in 1840. She was a widow and had a son, Warren Taylor, who was three years older than Samuel's daughter Ida. Besides her experience as a mother on the frontier, she brought something else to the table that not only Samuel would appreciate, but the river community in general — she had received an excellent education and had a "a thorough knowledge of the use of drugs and medicine." As we will see later on, she used those skills extensively and became an admired figure up and down the river. She had come west in 1872 but we do not know where she lived in the interim.
We have researched the Knapp family in external sources outside of the county and the Family Record and we finally solved the mystery of this woman whose past has only been superficially recorded. Hers is quite a story, most of which has become lost in the mist of history for the Tingley descendants in Washington state. Elizabeth's parents were actually Dr. Hiram Liscom Knapp, a native of New York State, and Elizabeth Haley Estabrook, from Connecticut. They married in 1826 in Orwell Township — in Bradford County, in northeast Pennsylvania, just across the border from Elmira, New York. Hiram L. Knapp relocated there in 1825 after attending Albany Medical College. He developed an "extended practice" over the years and they had 11 children together, ten of whom survived to adulthood.
Elizabeth H. (for Haley, not Mahaley) Knapp was the sixth child, born July 8, 1839, and two of her brothers were also doctors. Sometime between 1860 and 1866, she married Henry Taylor back in Pennsylvania. When Samuel and Elizabeth married in 1876, her only son Warren was ten. We know very little about him other than anecdotes that he worked in Anacortes and Alaska. The enumerator who was based in Hamilton area during the 1892 State Census recorded that he still lived at home at age 24, presumably helping his stepfather with the farm. The Pennsylvania research indicates that Warren died at age 34.
The most fascinating discovery from the Pennsylvania research is that Elizabeth's young brother, Dr. Capella Brutus Knapp, lived the last eight years of his life, 1888-1896, on the upper Skagit river. At first, we assumed from reports that he lived at Hamilton when that upriver town was booming as a potential center for coal and iron mining. But with the help of Deanna Ammons, we learned that writers of the period once again labeled the settlement south of the river as Hamilton. Deanna has found evidence from the school rolls that Dr. Knapp's children attended the school south of the river, which would not have been likely if they lived north of the river. He also signed the school records south of the Skagit as clerk in 1888-1889. She also discovered from early land records that Dr. Knapp purchased 160 acres at the south end of the Potts Road in Day Creek, which adjoined the Swafford family's land.
Known as "Pol," he was six years younger than Elizabeth, and was born at Orwell Township, May 6, 1845, as the ninth child of 11. He graduated from Hobart Medical College, and practiced first at Stevensville, also in Bradford County until he was 43. He married Susan Bosworth Crandal on April 5, 1877, and they had five children together before they moved to Hamilton in 1888. She was a teacher back there and out here, and he farmed and possibly was the first trained and licensed doctor in the upriver area. Their last child, James Russell Dutton Knapp, was born in Hamilton on June 23, 1888, and he became a dentist in Portland. Their eldest child, Edward Volney Knapp, was born on March 28, 1878, and he graduated from Leland Stanford University in California in 1900, not long after Scott Calhoun of LaConner, and future-president Herbert Hoover. He went on to graduate from Stanford Medical School and set up a practice in San Francisco. None of the children stayed in Hamilton, thus we can understand how the Knapp lineage is not well known to the Tingley descendants. We have C.B. Knapp's brief obituary, which noted that he died at "Hamilton" on March 10, 1896.

Gold beckons Samuel upriver, and he moves there By 1879, Samuel worked as a timber cruiser for Clothier & English, the partners who founded the town of Mount Vernon and a logging company at the bend of the river two miles above the fork where two log jams blocked the river until they were almost completely removed until that year. He told the 1906 Illustrated History interviewer that he was also lured upriver that same year by the gold excitement at Ruby Creek. Ruby was a tributary of the Skagit River and flowed into it at the point where the river flowed south from Canada and then turned west towards Puget Sound.
We know that the discovery of placer gold there was the result of exploration across Cascade Pass by a team led by Otto Klement, who arrived in the valley from Wisconsin in 1873, and German immigrant Karl (Charles) von Pressentin, who arrived in 1877. They crossed over the North Cascades to Stehekin and Lake Chelan and then back in 1877 and in 1878 they finally discovered gold in the vicinity of Ruby Creek. Word got out in 1879 when the gold was assayed in Seattle.
Before we read the Wildcat book, we assumed from scant records that Samuel went upriver as a prospector, but just like Mortimer Cook of Sedro-Woolley, he realized that the best bet for a return from a gold rush was to supply the argonauts, not compete with them. Clarice Tingley wrote:

Ruby Creek empties into the Skagit River east of what is now Ross Dam, in the Cascade Mountains. Naturally, the Skagit River was the only avenue of access. He used a thirty-two feet long dugout canoe, filled with mining supplies and manned by crews of Native American men, which was pulled up the river by mules along the bank. He had to change crews four times before he arrived at Rockport because of tribal boundaries. It meant death if a crewman ventured across another tribe's territory. Upon reaching his destination, Tingley would exchange mules, equipment, and supplies for ore samples and furs and float down the river, changing crews in reverse. [Wildcat, 2000]

Samuel and his sons and neighbors carved thousands of similar shingle bolts from the towering cedar trees on his ranch. This photo was taken by Darius Kinsey, the famed Woolley photographer, in the 1890s. The caption merely says it was taken by a stream. Courtesy of the book, Kinsey, Photographer.

After a hectic 1879 period, when the population at the new Ruby City climbed to 2,000 or more, the winter of 1879-80 slowed the operation way down as the snowfall was the deepest and most sustained of any winter in pioneer memory. Then, when that snowpack melted, the river rose to new levels, allowing sternwheelers to carry miners further upriver than ever before. They packed in from Hamilton, or in some cases from the vicinity of future-Marblemount, near where the Cascade River flowed into the Skagit. But like many gold strikes of the time, the placer gold petered out and the smart money knew that the only real hope for success would be hydraulic mining and other processes that would require investor capital, so the rush ended by the fall of 1880.
In that same year, Samuel opened a blacksmith shop in Mount Vernon, near where Harrison Clothier and Ed English had their store and trading post. He also moved Elizabeth and the children to Mount Vernon, which was still mainly a cluster of shacks and businesses catering to people coming or going upriver. As he continued cruising timberland, he liked a patch of 200 contiguous acres near the creek east of Clear Lake and south of the Skagit where the Day Brothers had largely clear cut, leaving rich farmland. The acreage — encompassing most of future Day Creek, was almost directly across the river from Lyman, Otto Klement's little burg that was the site of several logging camps. He moved his family to the new farm in 1881 or 1882, depending on the source.
Elizabeth carried their newest child with them, Henry J. Tingley, born Sept. 25, 1881, in Mount Vernon. They already had two children since their marriage. Mary Elizabeth Tingley was born in September 1878 while they still lived on the north fork, and their second child was also born there, Benjamin Hiram Tingley, on Oct. 22, 1879. He was destined to carry on his father's proud heritage as a man who loved to "mess around in boats."
Their farm and the surrounding farms that lay in a bowl between two hills that some locals called Happy Valley. Deanna Ammons discovered that Happy Valley became the popular name for the district by the 1920s. In the 1880s that district became the voting precinct of Tingley and by the turn of the 20th Century, it was known as Day Creek, named for the logging Day brothers, as explained below. The land had been surveyed just a few years before that and included stands of alder and cottonwood, swamps, natural springs and mosquitoes as "big as bats" that inspired Mortimer Cook in 1884 to name his new village about two miles away on the north shore of the river, Bug, and then rename it Sedro in 1885. Just as in the swampy area around Bug, much of the acreage around Tingley's ranch was dominated by huge old-growth cedars and fir.
We apologize for the confusion about the different names for the district from many sources. It is called all three names interchangeably at times, as well as being called Lyman or Hamilton because those were the nearest towns, across the river, until Sedro boomed in the last half of the 1880s. The nearby town at Clear Lake first rose as Mountain View briefly in 1890 and then was renamed Clearlake to conform to U.S. Post Office orders that discouraged multi-word town names.
The writer of the 1906 Illustrated History described Samuel's farm:

The present Tingley farm consists of 200 acres, ten of which are in fine orchard. The house is a homelike structure built in Southern style, and suggestive of hospitality and comfort, with fireplace, fur rugs, literature in abundance and musical instruments of many kinds. The Tingley family is one of culture and refinement, possessing especial aptness in music.

Samuel helps survey first wagon road

Elizabeth and Samuel Tingley, circa 1900. Photo courtesy of the 1906 book, Illustrated History of Skagit and Snohomish Counties

The remoteness of his farm and the lack of even a wagon road along the south shore of the Skagit meant that ingress and egress was almost exclusively by canoe and sternwheeler and that suited Samuel the sailor just fine, but he soon realized that if the logs and the resources of the South Skagit area were to be harvested, a passable road was a high priority. We also found a listing in the 1883-84 McKenney's Pacific Coast Directory that S.S. Tingley still had a blacksmith shop in Mount Vernon, so maybe he wanted access by land as well as by the river. In our notes below about the early South-Skagit wagon road, Samuel refers to the "county road to Clear Lake." We know from old maps that this was the early route west of Clear Lake that closely follows what is now called Swan Road. That early wagon road curved north of Barney Lake, east across the Nookachamps Creek and entered what is now Clear Lake on what is now called the Mud Lake Road. That is the same route that Lewis A. Boyd later used with his wagon to go shopping at the Clothier & English store in the early 1890s.
We plan to feature the research of the first roads in the South Skagit area by Deanna Ammons in a future issue. For now, we want to focus on Samuel's role in the survey for the original wagon rod there. Deanna provides some context for us: "the Clear Lake to Birdsview road that I gave you the information on begins at the north end of Clear Lake and ended at Birdsview on the south side of the river. On old maps, what is now Old Day Creek Rd. was referred to as Clear Lake to Birdsview road, later Pickering road, later Joe Johnson road and finally became the Old Day Creek Road. The early surveyors started at the north end of the lake and worked their way over the hill continuing on up to Day Creek but it took a long time for an actual road to ever happen. The Pickerings moved up on the hill in 1898 and the road was built to their place." Meanwhile, here is one document that Deanna found handwritten in a ledger book that is now in the State Regional Archives in Fairhaven:

Oct. 15, 1883, Whatcom County, Washington Territory Notice, Day Camp
To whom it may concern that notice is hereby given that there will be a petition for a county road before the board of county commissioners of Whatcom Co., said road to comense at the terminus of the county road at Clear Lake and running on the north side of Clear Lake and thence in an easterly direction over Little Mountain and on the first bench up the Skagit River passing by the coal mines and thence to the most probable route to Birdsview there to connect with co. road at Birdsview.
Signed, S.S. Tingley [almost all legal documents referred to him by his initials]

Amasa Peg-Leg Everett and his old Minnesota friend Orlando Graham had discovered the coal deposits in 1874, and Everett had lost half his leg on the slopes of Coal Mountain, a few miles east of Samuel's farm and across the Skagit from Hamilton. Birdsview was the little village clustered around the water-powered sawmill that B.D. "Birdsey" Minkler erected on the south shore and would soon be taken over by surveyor George Savage. The town of Mountain View/Clearlake was still a few years off, but several logging camps, including that of the Day brothers — Michael and John, were already felling the huge trees all over and around the hill that separated Samuel from the lake.
The documents concerning that road were signed by a growing group of neighbors on both sides of the river: C. [Karl] Von Pressintin [sic, actually von Pressentin], W.A. Moore, Charles Flynn, William Heffron, Birdsey D. Minkler, Otto Klement, Wm L. Taylor, John Day, Michael Day, J.J. Conner (John J. Conner of LaConner, not Julius J. Conner), Robert Lannigan, John Andrews, James Scott, M.O. Okeefe. Another document of Nov. 27, 1883 — signed at the exact time when Skagit County was being legally formed, addresses Samuel S. Tingley as "principal" of the road district and the Day brothers as "surities" (actually sureties).The road process dragged on for six years with several stops and starts, finally completed in a crude fashion, and an 1888 article about the road included more names, including C.B. Knapp, M.D., the only time we have seen his name until now.
The district around the Tingley farm became known as the Tingley Precinct in voting and census rolls. When the 1900 census was taken, showing the county population at 14, 272, Tingley was the penultimate of the smallest upriver precincts, with a population of 67; only Lake Cavanaugh had less, with two. Meanwhile, the Tingley family kept growing. Daughter Martha Ann Tingley was born on June 5, 1883. Although some sources claim that the family did not move upriver until 1884, the Family Record indicates that the birth was at Lyman. Lyman was the address for that stretch of river around the farm. Lillian Tingley, the last child of five by Elizabeth, was born on Nov. 1, 1888, that time at Mount Vernon.
When Samuel turned 46, he joined the establishment businessmen and farmers from Mount Vernon and the forks to help found the Mount Baker Lodge No. 36, Free and Accepted Masons. They actually chartered the group in Skagit City, on June 9, 1882, under the leadership of his fellow Fir Island settler, Thomas P. Hastie, Jr.. Samuel was installed as the first Junior Deacon of the lodge, but became a typo when the program was printed with his name spelled as Tingle, as historian Dick Fallis discovered.
As Samuel neared age 50, he continued to log and cruise timberland, a talent that became even more valuable in the 1880s and 1890s as settlers and loggers showed up in larger and larger numbers. Timber cruisers were among the most valued of pioneers because investors and bankers placed tremendous trust in them to estimate the value of vast timber stands. As Clarice Tingley points out, he also expanded on his skill with ships and engines by inventing and receiving patents for structural parts for the gravity ferries that began transporting people and horses and wagons across the Skagit River and its tributaries. The motive power for those ferries was the river's current itself. Builders would string a thick cable across the water from tall trees on both shores. Then they rigged a forked cable down from the overhead wire to a winch assembly that was attached to the scow or canoes lashed together to form the ferry itself. The nearest bridge was erected north across the river at Riverside and another connecting Mount Vernon proper with West Mount Vernon, so those ferries were the lifeline across the upper region of the Skagit. Even when a bridge spanned the river at Sedro-Woolley in 1912, a string of ferries carried the load upriver until bridges were built at The Dalles and Rockport in 1952 and 1962. Pioneers complimented him for having a hand in nearly every ferry on the river and for his skill in raising sternwheelers and other boats that sank often after being speared by snags just under the surface of the river or tributary streams. He also devised logging equipment and methods of repairing that equipment out in the woods.

Elizabeth Knapp Tingley also left her mark Elizabeth Tingley was just as feted as a key pioneer as Samuel was. Descendants talked about her delivering hundreds of babies for both whites and Indians. In their very early days at Happy Valley, she was a midwife and also ministered to the sick and injured, walking to homes and logging camps at times, or riding in a canoe, even in inclement weather, and later with her own horse and buggy. Some of her load was lessened when her brother, Dr. Capella Brutus Knapp, moved to the upriver region in 1888 and began farming in the Day Creek area. A trained and licensed woman doctor, Dr. Georgiana Batey, married Sedro pioneer David Batey in 1880 (see this Journal site) and moved with him to Sterling, so settler families could dispatch a messenger to either of them. By the time C.B. Knapp died in 1896, two more licensed doctors were in place at Sedro-Woolley, C.C. Harbaugh and Menzo B. Mattice.
Clarice Tingley presents more details of Tingley family life in her Wildcat book:

Many years later, during periods of reminiscing, Ben Tingley would relate memories of Indians who were ill, sitting or lying on the porch, wait¬ing for his mother to, minister to them. They called her Dr. Tingley. And he would tell of bringing small logs of wood for the fireplace into the house as one of his chores. He would place one end of the log into the fire and as the day wore on, his mother would push the log into the fire as needed. Sometimes, she would forget or be too busy to watch the fire closely and scorch or burn marks in the floor would result. Ben would not allow ivy to be planted around any of his homes, because he recalled ivy covering the outside fireplace bricks of his childhood home. When the ivy was re¬moved, the chimney fell apart.
Ben often told stories of the Tingley Saturday night band. All the chil¬dren of the family learned to play various instruments and his father re¬quired them to play at community social functions. Ben played the drums but had no desire to be a musician, so he would pound offbeat and incur the wrath of his father. Upon being ejected from the band, Ben could then dance and flirt with the gals.

Samuel S. Tingley died on April 25, 1913, at the Sedro-Woolley General Hospital, which probably means the old St. Elizabeth's at Fidalgo and Township. His obituary, which Deanna Ammons found in an unnamed local newspaper, noted that he was "one of the old pioneers of the Skagit Valley . . . one of the best known men in the Skagit Valley," but was surprisingly brief, even getting his age wrong, at 80, instead of 77.
His relationship with his children had at times been stormy, as Clear Lake old timers told Deanna Ammons, and Clarice Tingley mentions in her book, "Ben and his brothers were recipients of the biblical phrase 'spare the rod and spoil the child' but as parents, they did not practice this form of discipline, except in extreme cases." Another old timer told Deanna that Samuel "got it in his head that he was a preacher and would make the children sit on hard benches for hours at a time and preach to them out of the Bible." Another recalled that by the time the boys were fourteen, they began working away from home, in mills, logging camps or on farms. Although those memories may seem like a harsh indictment of Samuel, when you study the child-rearing practice of that period, you find that such was the description of many pioneer men, who worked hard, prayed hard and expected their children to learn by osmosis.
Deanna also obtained a copy of Elizabeth's obituary from a woman who grew up in Day Creek, again from an unnamed newspaper. Elizabeth lived as a widow on the old farm for four years and died on May 22, 1917. The obituary states that she had eight grandchildren and that all her children except for Warren Knapp Tingley and Lillian Tingley lived on the farm or around Day Creek at the time of her death: Elizabeth Tingley Haddix, Ben Tingley, Henry Tingley and Martha Tingley Powers. Lillian was single at that time and living in San Francisco. According to this article, she married Henry Taylor in 1860 and she came to the Pacific coast in 1872 — but we are unsure if they were still together. After moving West, she "practiced medicine" in San Francisco, Portland and Seattle. The obituary also gives us a deeper glimpse into her character and her talents beyond medicine:

Mrs. Tingley believed in the universal salvation of all mankind, quoting the Apostle Paul, "For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive." Her chief characteristic was generosity. Through bitterest poverty, she gave not what she could spare, but all she had. None were of too mean condition to receive aid and comfort from her.
She served the sick in this county for more than forty years. In times past going long distances by canoe, over Indian trails, or even through the tractless forest. She was a woman of superior culture and education. She was a painter, a poet, an author, and a musician. One of her favorite songs contains the line "Farewell, O Farewell, your hands now I hold, while they bear me away to the clouds lined with gold."

Ed. note: Another item on our to-do list is to study the formation of what became known as Day Creek. Deanna Ammons notes: "I know that the Potts had a shingle and lumber mill in 1906 and the name of it was Day Creek Lumber Co. In a legal document for Day Creek Lumber in 1906, the area is referred to as Day Creek. The Day Brothers were up there about the same time as Tingley and Day Creek (the creek) was referred to as "Day's Creek" on early maps." Deanna is going to give us more background and she is our number-one source because she grew up there when she and I attended Sedro-Woolley District 101 schools. We hope that others who grew up there or descend from Day Creek pioneer families will help us with information and copies of documents and photos
The Internet version of this story includes photos of the family and the area and links to several other sources. In Issue 38 of the Subscribers-paid Journal magazine online, you will also find another website that includes copies of the obituaries and documents that we have and stories and obituaries of the Tingley children.

Update: in the fall of 2006, we were contacted by Edradine Hovde, a granddaughter of Martha Ann Tingley, who followed Elizabeth's path of medicine. She married Hiram Powers on March 17, 1906, in Bellingham where she also graduated as a nurse in Bellingham. She divorced Powers after they had four surviving children together and later married Paul Kickhaffer. Martha was a nurse and matron in Sedro-Woolley during an undetermined period of the 1920s and '30s, first at the Valley Hospital on Ferry Street and then at the Memorial Hospital on State Street after it opened in 1929. She died in 1936.
We are grateful that Edradine also researched extensively at the district of Manette, which is part of Bremerton. Erv Jensen, the president of the Historical Society there, has documents that cover part of the period when Samuel first came to Washington Territory in 1859. Edradine discovered that in addition to his work on the revenue cutter, Samuel also worked "at the Port Orchard Mill, which was located on the north side of Manette across the Port Orchard Channel from Bainbridge Island. The mill was built by Charles Terry and William Renton around 1856. The present town of Port Orchard was then called Sidney."
After reading books by both General (and first Washington Territorial Governor) I.I. Stevens and his son, General Hazard Stevens, she has also begun pursuing a hunch that Samuel could have come west with the new governor, maybe as an assistant engineer on the railroad reconnaissance survey. We are excited to see what she might find to validate her theory. That and other details will be posted in subsequent updates to this story and in another chapter we plan, which will also profile his children and their impact on Skagit County.
Journal Ed. note: Another item on our to-do list is to study the formation of what became known as Day Creek. Deanna Ammons notes: "I know that the Potts had a shingle and lumber mill in 1906 and the name of it was Day Creek Lumber Co. In a legal document for Day Creek Lumber in 1906, the area is referred to as Day Creek. The Day Brothers were up there about the same time as Tingley and Day Creek (the creek) was referred to as "Day's Creek" on early maps." Deanna is going to give us more background and she is our number-one source because she grew up there when she and I attended Sedro-Woolley District 101 schools. We hope that others who grew up there or descend from Day Creek pioneer families will help us with information and copies of documents and photos. In Issue 38 of the Subscribers-paid Journal magazine online, you will also find another website that includes copies of the obituaries and documents that we have and stories and obituaries of the Tingley children.

Links, background reading and sources

Return to Samuel Simpson Tingley Part One, of Tingley's profile, including settling into Day Creek, Happy Valley, in 1880,, raises family, blacksmith in Mount Vernon, loses first wife, marries again to doctoress, builds boats and ferries for Skagit River.

Story posted on Aug. 20, 2006, and last updated Dec. 2016
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Skagit River Journal

Samuel Simpson Tingley, his pioneer Skagit family

Samuel Simpson Tingley,
his pioneer Skagit family