Taking a stroll through La Conner's colorful past

Some of La Conner’s oldest buildings have checkered pasts – and the Skagit County Historical Museum is airing their salacious secrets.

With a walk down town, we can learn there used to be a grocery store with a brothel upstairs on First Street. Another landmark building was a place smugglers hid human cargo they brought in illegally from China.

All it takes is a map and a cell phone to hear about La Conner’s colorful past in the museum’s tell-all walking tour.

Completed in April, the phone-assisted walking tour was created to supplement historical information about the buildings already available on the Town of La Conner’s website, townoflaconner.org.

“We wanted to celebrate La Conner, said Jo Wolfe, Director of Development at the museum. The town provides a walking tour map online but the new project offers a more immersive experience.

“We really wanted to utilize the OnCell technology we have and provide a historic perspective to the buildings,” she said.

The OnCell mobile tour allows people to enter in a 3-digit code on their cell phone for each historic site and listen to a brief narration describing the building’s origins, significance and the evolution to its current use –just make sure to push all the digits, otherwise you will be switched to the museum’s Historic Barn Tour.

The La Conner tour begins at what was built in 1877 at the La Conner Grange on South Second Street, the hilltop building that is now the Civic Garden Club. Walkers can stroll through the town and end up at Calico Cupboard on at the south end of First Street. The building was once a U.S. Coast Guard office, and was built on the site of an 1885 hotel that burned down.

The museum’s tour features 20 buildings.

Visitors can purchase a map with the codes and instructions at the museum’s front desk or from the Chamber of Commerce office on Morris Street. The souvenir-worthy $2 brochure, printed on thick, old-fashioned style paper, features building drawings by Craig Bartlett in lieu of photos.

The museum’s archivist found a donated poster with Bartlett’s drawings, Wolfe said, but they didn’t know who he was until Googling his name.

The results were for a famous Hollywood animator, she said, the creator of Hey Arnold! and writer for Rugrats and Johnny Bravo. She couldn’t believe they were the same person until she got in touch with Bartlett’s sister, Connie Funk, who works at La Conner School District, and confirmed it.

Even long-time residents may be surprised by some of the secrets their hometown’s buildings hold. As visitors grab lunch or browse art galleries at the Pier 7 shopping mini mall, they’re walking in a place where Chinese people were supposedly once smuggled into the country.

The Pier 7 building was originally a Chinese-owned laundry building, built in 1875 by Quong Lung. Lisa Judy, whose grandparents Jerry and Donna Blades, owned and restored the building, remembers hearing the stories of the hidden immigrants when she was a child.

“They’d bring them in by ship, and smuggle them in underneath the building,” Judy said. “And they’d be housed there for a period of time.”

After retiring its smuggling operations, the building was used as a seed company and boat house before becoming today’s mini mall with a restaurant, art gallery and custom T-shirt shop.

Other buildings in town also have slightly nefarious origins, including the Ginger Grater & Olive Shoppe, which in the 1890s was the Wiggin’s Store. It featured groceries and house wares downstairs, and a brothel upstairs.

Besides smuggling and prostitution, many of the historic buildings have interesting backstories that provide insight as to how the Town of La Conner developed—coming a long way from its days as a settlement with a population of 28 in the 1860s.

Wolfe said the museum has sold about 200 maps since the historical tour had its official kickoff in Gilkey Square in the spring.

“We had anticipated that tourists would come,” she said of the launch, “but it was mainly locals who were really interested and excited about learning the history.”

She said some owners have contacted the museum and asked why their buildings aren’t included in the tour.

It’s due to space and time constraints, Wolfe said, but they’d love to expand the tour in the future.

“It was a really fun project and we enjoy sharing the stories.”