Woodland to farmlands to zoned land

By JOHN IWASAKI
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

While the Gold Coast nickname is often stuck on all four towns, it has historically applied to Medina.

Medina and Clyde Hill pioneers felled cedar and Douglas fir, clearing the land for orchards and strawberry fields in the 1890s. Later, wealthy landowners bought acreage from the Medina homesteaders and built estates.

A pioneer woman named the town Medina after the holy city of Saudi Arabia. Clyde Hill's name came from a Scottish immigrant who said the area reminded him of an area called the Firth of Clyde in his native land.

Hunts Point and Yarrow Point were homesteaded and later became the sites of summer cabins and family retreats.

Ferry service from Leschi to Medina brought Seattle residents across the lake for picnics and golf. According to a 1937 ferry schedule, the boats made 22 daily trips and roundtrip tickets sold for 25 cents.

Only seven families lived permanently in Medina by 1908, the year Medina Grocery was built, says John Frost, who bought the store in 1951 and ran it for 33 years.

Clyde Hill was incorporated in 1953. Hunts Point and Medina followed in 1955, Yarrow Point in 1959. All four sought incorporation to escape Bellevue's zoning laws.

"We were scared to death of Bellevue taking over us," Frost says.

Clyde Hill in particular was founded to counter a developer's plan to cram more than 90 homes in a rural area with no sewer service, says Freeman Fike, an incorporation backer and early mayor. Town fathers stipulated that minimum lot sizes must be a generous 20,000 square feet.

In Clyde Hill's infancy, Phil Barber played in pear orchards and blackberry fields, built forts and pitched a paper route. He remembers the pride of giving directions to his house on Northeast 27th, the first paved street in the area.

"It was a 15-block playground," recalls Barber, who returned three years ago to become principal of Clyde Hill Elementary, his old school.