Originally published Saturday, January 2, 1999

By JON HAHN  
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

Francis H. Giard Jr. grew up in another Stanwood.

It was the long-ago Stanwood. And it actually was a different town, called East Stanwood. Many of its streets were platted by his father, who helped settle and civilize the community after he returned from the Klondike.

"He actually returned twice," Francis said. "He came back the first time on a steamer that wrecked and went to the bottom and he was lucky to survive. He lost everything, so he went back to the Klondike."

And that, says Francis, is an indication of the hard work and vision of the people who carved Stanwood and East Stanwood out of a wilderness.

Francis H. Giard Jr., is a self-described "hermit farmer." He tends to a few head of cattle on what's left of the former Camano's Best turkey farm just across the high bridge on Camano Island, near Stanwood, where he moved with his mother in 1964. (She has since passed away.)

"I've farmed here, mostly dairy and hay, ever since then," he said almost apologetically. "I was up to 59 cows at one time, but now there's just a few, and there's just me working it."

His heart and a happy childhood are back in East Stanwood, where he was born in the house that Norwegian carpenters built for his father back in '04. "I guess I've been something of a failure, compared to men like my father," he said. "I've never been away from here. I've never even wanted to leave."

Partly because of that Stanwood-centric view of life, Francis knows every roll of the land, every farm field and slough. He knows what was on a particular street corner in town before whatever's there now.

His father, who helped found the Stanwood Bank and served as the first mayor of East Stanwood, bought 90 acres of what is now the east part of consolidated Stanwood's downtown. The property ran from what was then the Great Northern Railway tracks, and along what now is 271st Street, all the way into the "other Stanwood." The American Legion Hall and the Stanwood Fire Department now sit on land his father donated to East Stanwood.

"Can you imagine someone doing something like that today?" Francis asked incredulously. "Just giving land for the public good?" He also admires the foresight of a father who laid out many of the East Stanwood streets "before there were any cars here . . . and those streets still work for car traffic, although it's much more now than anyone could've seen then."

When cars did appear in East Stanwood, a small freight and lumber connector rail line called the "Dinky" would sometimes clip the edges of cars that hadn't pulled close enough to the street curbs, Francis recalled.

And because the Dinky's line ran on a relatively uneven roadbed, right through his father's 90 acres, sometimes it jumped the tracks. Once it derailed and ended up at the Giards' front gate.

Some of the sloughs that wove through the Stanwood back-lands are gone now, filled in as land was reclaimed for the growing town or needed as farmland. Francis recalls watching men and horses build much of the extensive dike system around Stanwood. When he was a much younger man, he worked a backhoe to help clear the ditch system along some of those dikes.

His father's first wife and a daughter both died of tuberculosis in the early part of this century and he married again. By the time Francis and his older sister, Marcella, were born, their father's efforts to plant berry vines and cherry trees blossomed into a family business.

"We cooked with a wood stove, of course," Francis said, "But we had gas lighting, and we had a little shed out back where we generated our own carbide gas."

To make ends meet, his father also hunted ducks and geese and regularly shipped those fowl to market in a sloop from Stanwood to Seattle. In what must have been his spare time, his father also helped launch a local water company. It seems that a good living could be made in Stanwood then for anyone willing to work long and hard.

"But I can remember during the Depression, when the bottom went out of the business. Men would hire on to work for my dad for $2 a day and were glad to get the work," he recalled.

"Men would ride the rails through town on the Great Northern Railway, and they would always stop at our house, not far from the railroad, looking for a meal. But I also remember that they absolutely refused any food from my mother unless they could work for it, like splitting firewood or picking weeds. People looking for free meals today aren't like that anymore."

To help pay taxes then, many local people helped construct the local road system, trading their labor in a deal to save their family homes and properties, Francis said.

He and his sister walked uphill to the old Lincoln High "which now has been changed into senior housing," he said nostalgically. "We used to have one heckuva competition with Stanwood High. Those were really big events, the football and basketball games then."

Youngsters in Stanwood found simple things to do for pleasure, Francis recalled. "Of course, I had to work at home. But my dad was an avid hunter and fisherman, and when I was just a boy, I got hooked on duck and goose hunting."

When he spoke to the local historical society not long ago, Francis recalled that while early Stanwood residents ate a lot of lutefisk, the big food event in Stanwood was the annual Duck Mulligan Feed. Local duck hunters, including the mayors of Stanwood and East Stanwood, supplied the fowl for the feed, which drew customers from as far away as Seattle.

"I still go out hunting, usually with a friend, in the 14-foot duck boat my father built by hand from 1-inch cedar wood strips. It's as good today as the day he launched it. It gets pretty cold out there on the water when it's raining and the wind is blowing, like we've had so much of this year, so I've only been out once so far this year."

He served a short time on the city council, Francis said, but he'd just as soon not talk about that, thank you. Neither does he find time or reason enough to go into town on just social visits, "even though I still know quite a few folks in town.

"No, it's better for me to stay here and work my cattle. I really don't have to, but if you don't have something to do, you're done for. I can't quit."

And besides, there are what looks to be thousands of geese and ducks wintering not far from where Francis H. Giard Jr. keeps his father's old duck boat.