Town’s Pioneer Monument has 85th anniversary year

It is the first, and in historic terms, the most lasting image motorists entering town from the east and north have of La Conner.

Pioneer Monument, the iconic granite shaft with pictorial reliefs of early Skagit Valley scenes around its base, has stood in the present roundabout area for 85 years, an enduring symbol made possible by a tireless fundraising campaign conducted here during the Great Depression.

Installed in 1936 to honor the area’s early pioneers, the 12-foot monument was formally dedicated that year on Pioneer Picnic Day – Aug. 6, the first Thursday of the month – during ceremonies attended by an estimated crowd of 500 people.

The Skagit County Pioneer Association began raising money for the monument in 1925, according to accounts written by its longtime memorialist, the late John Flood Conrad.

Support and money for the project was much in evidence from the outset. But while that support never wavered, the impact of the Oct. 29, 1929 stock market crash and ensuing economic crisis significantly slowed the flow of cash.

After 10 years, the Pioneer Monument donation fund stood at $1,750 in cash and $700 in pledges.

Conrad said it was then that the monument’s designer, A.D. Frets, of Mount Vernon and a native of Waterloo, Indiana, came to the rescue.

During one of his “Colorful Lives” presentations at the annual Pioneer Picnic in La Conner, Conrad said Frets agreed to build the monument for $2,750 “and then to enable its erection he donated $150 himself.”

The monument made an impression upon young and old alike almost immediately upon its completion. For example, consider the recollections of 91-year-old Mary Johnson Basye.

“In 1938, my family came from Sacramento to visit my grandfather Andrew John Johnson,” she told her daughter, Weekly News contributor Anne Basye. “I was eight-years-old. My grandfather, my father and I attended the funeral of his friend, Dry Slough Johnson, an old bachelor from Fir Island.

“I was the only child,” she recalled, “and everyone was very nice to me. The funeral was at Kern’s, in the building where Santo Coyote is today. I don’t remember any music but in his sermon the minister from Salem Lutheran referred to Mr. Dry Slough Johnson as a pioneer. I assumed he would be buried with all the other pioneers under the marker at the edge of town.

“A year later my own grandfather died,” she said. “I expected he would be buried under the monument, too. But my father explained to me that the monument was to honor the pioneers (and that) the pioneers were buried at Pleasant Ridge.

“Every time I’ve been in that restaurant – when it was the pizza parlor or the Greek restaurant – I think I’m the only person who was here when it was a funeral home,” she added.

If anyone was ideally suited to chronicle the monument’s history, it was Conrad, a World War I veteran. A descendant of pioneer Magnus Anderson, whose 19th century cabin is a La Conner landmark, Conrad grew up near town before later owning a service station outside Sedro-Woolley.

Conrad thus served as a bridge between the western and eastern parts of Skagit County.

While tending the station, he was said to have plied his customers with coffee, cookies and snacks until they shared with him their family memories. Conrad would then dutifully scribble down notes in one of his many writing tablets for future reference, often used to develop a Colorful Lives profile, a mainstay of Pioneer Picnics for a quarter century.

It was Conrad, too, who is credited with suggesting the name “Loggerodeo” for the Independence Day celebration held in Sedro-Woolley.

Still, it was unrelenting devotion to research for which Conrad was best known. His study of the Frets Monument Company, established in the 1940s, that led to Conrad’s reflections on the Pioneer Monument.

“Perhaps their best remembered job and one of the largest,” Conrad said of A.D. and Jimmer Frets, “was our own Pioneer Association Monument erected at the entrance to La Conner.”