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Going to Sedro WoolleyBy Gary Carden |
Gary Carden |
When I used to ride the Standard Oil truck with my grandfather, he would sometimes strike up conversations with store owners, clerks and ministers about the "good-old days." He would ask about a missing acquaintance:
Whatever happened to that redheaded Crawford that used to haul acid wood up in Norton?" Frequently, the response was, "Why, he's gone to Sedro Woolley!" Sitting in Velt's Cafe with my Uncle Albert, he would sometime inquire about an attractive former girlfriend and get the same response. "Her family went to Sedro Woolley about two years ago." |
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No one ever bothered to tell me where Sedro Woolley was, so I was left to my own overly-active imagination. I decided it was an imaginary place like Phil Harris' "Doo-Wa-Ditty" (It ain't no town, and it ain't no city) or Shangri-la or that mysterious place called Dark Corners that bootleggers and murderers escaped to down on the South Carolina-Georgia line. I decided that maybe saying that someone had moved to Sedro Woolley was a poetic way of saying they had died. I had a deceased uncle who had gone "where the woodbine twines," according to my grandfather, adding that you could buy good moonshine there.
A couple of weeks ago, when I was telling stories down in Georgia, I stopped at Joe's Country Cafe in Otto for breakfast. While I was paying my bill, I noticed a stack of books on the counter, "Two Centuries of Otto History: 1789 to 1999." Well, I couldn't resist. When I got home, I opened to the Table of Contents and found between "Dust Storms in the Mountains" and "Entertainment in Otto" a chapter titled "From Otto to Sedro Woolley." Although the author, Ralph Henson, had not been there, he knew an amazing number of people who had. Some of them had even returned. So it was that I finally learned that Sedro Woolley is in the state of Washington close to the Pacific Ocean. It is noted for the fact that it has a "Carolina contingent." Specifically, this means that an unusually large number of people from Western North Carolina had moved there over a century ago and that a healthy migration continued for the next 50 years. Sedro Woolley had tremendous appeal for depression era residents of this region for two significant reasons. It looked a great deal like the Blue Ridge and the Smokies, and Sedro Woolley had a thriving timber industry while the same industries in Western North Carolina were winding down. As a consequence, the majority of the people who migrated to the Pacific Coast consisted of skilled timber workers who had been lured by the promise of better wages and a better economic life. Further, they were assured of an easy adjustment to a new place since the majority of their neighbors came from WNC. The author noted that the migration had almost stopped in recent years, but a lot of the people in Jackson and Macon counties have relatives on the Pacific Coast. Sedro Woolley is full of names like Cabe, Parrish, Burch, Henson, Holden, Conley, Rogers and Carpenter. Well, that was all a surprise to me although it appears to be common knowledge to a lot of Jackson County folks. Last week, a lady called me from a local motel and said that she thought she was related to me, and would I mind coming down and talking to her. I met her at the Jackson County Library and discovered that she was indeed related to me and had been close friends with some of my mother's childhood acquaintances. Then, I finally asked her where she lives now. "Sedro Woolley," she said. "There are a goodly number of Ashes, Extines, Gibsons and Shepherds out there." She also told me that storytellers were very popular there, and that if I ever decided to relocate, I would probably thrive in Sedro Woolley. Well, I like the name. It has sort of a magical, lyric quality. I looked it up on the Internet, and it has a new industry: Honeymooners. And there are tours to the ocean to watch the whales. Hummmm. I could drag out all of those old stories that everyone is sick of hearing here, and give them (and me) a new life. It would almost be worth it just to be able to tell people where I was going. "Where are you going, Gary?" "I'm going to Sedro Woolley. (I am sure that there are hundreds of folks in this county that know more about Sedro Woolley than I do. I'd like to hear from all of them.) Editor's Note: Western Carolina University professor Scott Philyaw is doing research on the migration from Jackson County to Skagit County, Washington (location of Sedro Woolley). Find that column on our web site: Ruralite Cafe in the Aug. 24, 2000, archives. |
Back to Archive: 11/02/00. |