By Lucile McDonald NEWSPAPER ARTICLE IN "THE SEATTLE TIME" Sunday, October 19, 1958

Lopez is the agricultural island of the San Juans and the residents prefer to have it stay that way if the proliferating rabbits of the archipelago just will leave it alone. The bunnies nipped squashes and cucumbers in gardens in the past summer.

The island, third largest of the San Juans, is 29 square miles in area. It has three tiny towns, two restaurants, one hotel (with six bedrooms), a fishing fleet, an airport, a new golf course, several resorts and the Henderson camps for boys and girls.

In winter, the 600 inhabitants of Lopez Island tend their broad acres and lead a pastoral existence. They eat the products of gardens and orchards, home-grown beef slaughtered on the island and home-hunted venison.

One cannot starve on Lopez. If all its farm bounty were removed there still would be butter clams, crabs, rock cod, ling cod, red snapper and salmon to be had along its sprawling bay-indented shore and rainbow trout from its solitary lake.

"What do I like best about Lopez?" said one resident. The answer is, "No bums." It's uncommercialized," declared another.

There never was a greater period of prosperity than prevails on the island today. Whereas it once had entirely a farming population, only a handful of persons now depends on raising produce for a living. A few have gone into dairying and some are retired on pensions.

Lopez Island is full of fishermen. Almost every "farmer" spends part of each year with a commercial fishing boat. When the salmon run is over he goes back home to milk cows or put up feed for his beef cattle.

In the salmon season a fleet of reef-netters is visible from the Lopez store. Purse-seiners and gill-netters crowd Mackaye Harbor, where fish-buyers maintain stations.

There used to be two canneries at Richardson, but these have closed and the catch is shipped from the island.

RichAardson formerly was the port where mail vessels called. At the turn of the century it was the most important trading center in San Juan County.

The port was founded about 1870 by George Richardson and owed its prosperity to a wharf and warehouse built by William Graham, a Canadian who settled nearby in 1877.

The island attracted settlers as early as 1852 when William R. Pattle, a British subject, built two log huts and prepared to trade with the Indians. The British authorities persuaded him to transfer his operations to other shores. He moved to Bellingham Bay to cut timber and soon was identified with the discovery of coal.

The next year R. W. Cousins and several companions took possession of Pattle's huts and were logging when the British interrupted the summer's work. By fall Gov. James Douglas of Victoria was able to report that he had got rid of both Pattle and Cousins "without creating a disturbance."

After the "Pig War" episode in 1859 resulted in joint occupation of the islands by Britain and the Unites States, James Nelson, a sailor and Charles Brown, a Swede who carried mail to soldiers at American Camp on San Juan, settled on land adjacent to each other near Port Stanley.

Other arrivals were Hiram F. Hutchinson, who later opened a store at Lopez, and Sam Hinton, who said in later years that deerskins were the only island commodity a man could trade long ago when he settled there.

Miss Addie (Ellen Adelia) Chadwick, who was born 79 years ago in the house where she lives near Watmough Bight, recalls that when her father arrived on the island in the 1870's the Davis, Brown, Barlow, Bartlett, and Weeks families already were there.

An 1876 issue of West Shore Magazine placed the number of families at seven or eight and made a plea for the island's bachelors. Who were in the majority and needed "queens" for their log cabins.

"We don't know how my father, Sampson Chadwick, got interested in Lopez Island," said Miss Chadwick. "When he died we found a box of his papers in the attic going back to 1871, so we know he was on the Coast that early.

"He became acquainted with John Keddy, a settler on San Juan Island who sold mutton to both the English and American camps during the occupation. My father obtained 200 sheep from him and ran them on the south end of Lopez."

Chadwick, a Canadian, was attached sentimentally to the islands and wrote verses about them which were published in territorial newspapers and signed only "Lopez, W. T."

In 1877, Chadwick married Adelia Bradshaw, daughter of a Port Townsend attorney and a Clallam Indian woman. Adelia was 18 and was working for the Hezekiah Davis family on Long Island, southwest of Richardson.

Chadwick took his bride to her new home in a canoe. He had built a small house on the south side of Watmough Head, but it was exposed to storms and he moved to a less windy location on the present house site. Gradually he added to the cabin, building a living room with broad windows through which he could watch vessels passing in Rosario Strait.

Old settlers had a saying "They had to kill a man in order to start a cemetery on Lopez." The first one buried was John Anderson, shot by his neighbor, John Kay, in May 1882. The two men lived on opposite sides of Sperry Point, near Lopez Pass, on the property where Frank Henderson has his camps. Kay's old house, erected in 1878, is one of the camp showplaces. Kay, a Norwegian, and Anderson, a Swede, disliked each other. One day Anderson, looking for his cow, discovered that at low tide it had gone around a dividing fence between the two homesteads and into Kay's oat field. Heated words were exchanged by the men, ending with Anderson's giving Kay and his Indian wife a beating. As Anderson set out for home Kay went into his house, picked up a musket and called out to his assailant. When Anderson turned around Kay fired, hitting him below the heart. Kay paid for his victory by serving a short term in the penitentiary. Kay just had been released and was on Decatur Island when Willie Cousins' family settled on Lopez.

Willie, aged 84, recalls landing on the island April 13, 1883. "My parents were Irish," Cousins said. "I was the youngest in the family, born in Harden County, Iowa. My father, James Cousins, was a brother of Robert Cousins. Some of our relatives were living at the Graham and McCauley places.

"Father took 160 acres as a homestead and bought 80 acres more. He planted an orchard in 1885 on a hill and set out additional fruit trees on the tract where I live on Hunter Bay, in 1892. He moved his original house down here and added to it." Cousins spoke of the time when the orchard grew quantities of apples which sold at 75 to 85 cents a box. He and his brothers continued to live on the property after their parents died, but the boys were bachelors. Willie is the last survivor. His closest relatives are cousins on the Washington mainland. Willie lives alone in the old house.

Mrs. Susie M. Arnett of Port Stanley has resided on the island only one year less than Cousins. She arrived in 1884, when she was 4 years old. Her father, Edmund Cochran, a graduate of Ypsilanti University, expected to make a fortune in farming.

"Father didn't know the resistance of green timer," Mrs. Arnett said. "Everything you put a hand to, first you had to take an ax and clear the land." Cochran taught the island school in 1884, 1885 and 1887. The first two terms were in a rough log building reputed the poorest school in the county. The superintendent described it as so "thoroughly ventilated by numerous cracks and crevices in the chinking that both pupils and teacher were almost constantly taking colds."

By contrast, Lopez now has a six-room modern school in the center of the island, served by busses.

Like everything else on Lopez, transportation has changed. Steamboats no longer call daily for passengers at Richardson and Port Stanley. The ferry lands near Upright Head and residents drive home in automobiles.

Port Stanley flourished in 1892 under the stimulus of the Port Stanley Townsite & Development Co. In the First World War it had a kelp-processing plant for extraction of iodine and soap ingredients.

Richardson and Lopez always have been supply points for fishermen. Lopez sits at the entrance to picturesque Fisherman Bay, where purse-seiners sometimes winter. The bay is separated from San Juan Channel by a narrow sandspit, traversed by a county road leading to summer cottages on a pretty peninsula.

The upper end of the bay is a lagoon fringed with tall marsh grass. At its end is William McCauley's slaughterhouse, to which farmers on the other islands take their cattle. Some of the meat goes back to butcher shops in the islands and the surplus is shipped to Seattle.

Each year a few more outsiders learn of Lopez' lovely beaches and little islands tied to it by spits. They drive over its good roads and peer at its orchards and cottages. The island still has the peace and plenty that charmed the planners.