In ol' Duvall, they keep commuters' houses just over the hill

Originally published Saturday, September 26, 1998

By NEIL MODIE
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

When Julie and Jeff Tisdale moved from Bellevue to their new house in Duvall four years ago, they slept with an electric fan on, just to have some noise.

"It was so quiet, your ears would ring," Julie recalls.

The Tisdales no longer need the fan, although nights are still pretty quiet. But during the day they now hear the cars, lawn mowers and tricycles of a flood of new neighbors, the rumble of dump trucks, the traffic streaming to and from almost-new Cedarcrest High School at the end of 150th Avenue Northeast.

The couple's home is just off 150th, in division I of Taylor's Ridge. Several blocks away, screeching saws and thundering hammers announce the development of Taylor's Ridge divisions III and IV, spreading ever farther across the once-wooded plateau above downtown Duvall. Deer occasionally go bounding past the home sites.

The Tisdales and their 4-1/2-year-old son, Hunter, live in the new half of Duvall. This once-bucolic, once-hippiesque farming town now seems like two adjoining but separate communities, out of sight of each other, divided by topography and demographics.

Just above the east bank of the languid Snoqualmie River and its flat, green, agricultural flood plain is "Old Town," as locals call it. It still has a small-town-scale Main Street, single stoplight, old buildings, locally owned shops and slow pace. What is doesn't have is McDonald's, Starbucks and Kmart.

Atop the plateau rising immediately east of downtown, past scattered pastures and woods, is a jarring contrast: new, rapidly spreading suburbia, seemingly transplanted whole from Redmond or Issaquah.