New state park is big news

By REBEKAH DENN
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

In the island's biggest project in recent years, the nonprofit Friends of the Camano Island Parks successfully lobbied for a new 434-acre state park after the Camano natives who owned the property offered to sell it for park land below market value. The park is expected to open in a year or two.

The property, the old Cama Beach resort, was the biggest and plushest of more than a dozen summer resorts that dotted the island in the 1930s and 1940s, says Linde DeVere, director of the newly formed Cama Beach Institute.

"It was wonderful . . . It was sophisticated," says longtime resident Grace Cornwell, 92, who used to walk to the resort to watch visitors shop in the grocery store and watch movies in the big hall.

The dining hall is long burned down, but the old gray rowboats with "Cama Beach" painted on the sides still wait in the creaky old boathouse. Heavy glass bottles of castor oil and wooden cigar boxes rest on the shelves of the old store, and signs in the sturdy cedar cabins tell visitors about icebox deliveries. Clam shells are scattered on the solitary beach.

The nonprofit institute, the state, and the two families who owned the land -- granddaughters of the resort's founding owners -- are restoring the resort buildings as historic sites, and are planning both educational and recreational areas on the beach and adjacent wooded land. The Center for Wooden Boats in Seattle will run the old boathouse and teach classes there.

The Cama Beach efforts echoed the volunteer work nearly a half-century earlier that built the 400-acre Camano Island State Park a mile down the road.

In 1949, the South Camano Grange put out a call for volunteers to build a park on the logged land, hoping to win a community service prize.

More than 900 people turned out with tractors and shovels, the women serving the male laborers clam chowder.

"It was real community spirit," recalls 89-year-old Ole Eide. He's just one of many island residents who still remember that day.

"A lot of people live to be a pretty good age out here."