Pull up a seat, because I want to tell you about a piece of ground you are driving past and the family who simply handed it over.
Understand the moment first. This is the Pacific Northwest at the turn of the last century, and the whole economy runs on taking things out of the landscape — timber off the hills, coal out of the ground, stone out of the quarries, fish out of the water. Land on a shoreline with a road along it was not scenery. It was inventory.
Charles Xavier Larrabee was a man who had done well out of exactly that world — mining, land, railroads, the development of Fairhaven down the coast. He was, in the plainest terms, a capitalist in a boom town.
And he had a piece of shoreline here on Chuckanut, and he had a notion about it that was distinctly unusual for his time and his class: that it should belong to everybody, permanently, and that nobody should ever cut it or build on it or sell it again.
He died before he could finish the business. And here is where it turns, because that is usually the end of these stories — the visionary dies and the heirs sell the land.
His family did not. His widow and his sons went ahead and gave the ground to the State of Washington. Twenty acres. October of nineteen fifteen, the governor accepted the deed.
And that deed created something that did not exist the day before: Washington had no state parks. Not one. This was the FIRST — the seed of an entire system that now runs to well over a hundred parks across the state, millions of visits a year, and shoreline and forest that would otherwise be somebody's back lawn.
They put his name on it in nineteen twenty-three.
Now — I will not paint him as a saint. He made his money the way men made money here, and some of that came out of the same hills. But he understood something most of his contemporaries never did: that a place like this is worth more standing than sold, and that the only way to guarantee that is to give it away where nobody can take it back.
So when you pass those park signs, remember it started as twenty acres and a family that could have sold it and did not. Everything else grew from that.