Our Business History

Grandfather and Grandmother

This story is about our family's historical beginnings here in the upper Skagit, and the development of the village of Bullerville.

In 1888 Matilda Clark Buller came from Pennsylvania with her husband, Richard Henry Lee Buller, to Seattle. She was of Pennsylvania Dutch descent, and would have been a leader in Women’s Lib today if she were here. She was a milliner by trade (she made hats) and had the equivalent of a PhD in education. She taught her children and the Indian children reading and writing. Matilda had three sons, Richard (our grandfather), Wade and Carl. She left her husband in Seattle at the Veterans Hospital. He had been wounded in the civil war. She brought her three sons up the Skagit River by Indian canoe in 1888, the year before Washington became a state. Grandfather Richard was seven years old at the time. To support her family, she started a roadhouse above the current town of Marblemount. She and a gold miner are credited with naming the town. The miner came into the road house excited and said "Matilda, I found a mountain of marble!" She said "We should call this place Marblemountain." It was later shortened to Marblemount.

In 1900, during the Alaska gold rush, she and two of her sons, Richard, now 19, and Carl, decided to go north and pan for gold, and again operated a roadhouse, this time near Nome. She kept a diary during the two years she was in Alaska, and WOW!…the things that happened to her. She returned to Marblemount and ran another roadhouse, settling near Corkindale Creek. It was here she wrote a book called "Roadhouse Tales" which are short stories that happened to her personally adapted from the diary she kept, or were stories told to her by the miners. A copy of that book is at our Eatery Restaurant today.

Richard and Ethel came to own all the property below Cow Heaven Mountain, extending all the way to the Skagit River. Grandmother had her own cheese factory called the Glacier View Cheese Factory and sold her cheese in Anacortes. Grandfather had a number of businesses going. He had two sawmills, a veal ranch, a bulb farm with narcissus, daffodils and tulips, a lilac nursery, and a truck farm with his garden fresh vegetables being sold in Seattle's Pike Place Market.

If that wasn’t enough to keep them busy, they built a dance hall, and every Saturday night they put on a dance and sold suppers for 50 cents. Because of the sawmill and cheese factory, hot water was regularly available, and so they had a special bath house built with running hot water to the tub. The ladies would come during the day and have my Aunt Florence fix their hair after they had a bath in the only "Hot Tub" in town. They were some of the first people in the Skagit to have electricity, as grandfather installed a flume off Joe Perough Creek that brought water right to the house and boilers. To keep their food cool the water ran in a trough right into the kitchen with a screened off area with doors to put milk, eggs and homemade butter in. There was also a pie safe to keep any pests (and children!) out of her pies cooling after they came piping hot out of the oven.

The sawmill was a water powered sawmill, and grandfather milled cedar, fir, and hemlock. Recently, Don Smith, one of our valley artists, painted the mural on the front wall of The Eatery. The mural was copied from old photos of the mill, and with the original headsaw incorporated right in, it looks like the log is being sawed right there. If you have a chance to go to The Eatery, do go outside and look at the wall mural. Grandfather Richard is to the left, and his sons Russell, Lee and Bud (Carl) are in the foreground. Can you find the deer?

After the depression Richard and his sons rebuilt the sawmills here, added a new dance hall and even had a railroad spur put in right to the mill site. This became Bullerville, the site of operations of the Buller Brother Lumber Company. In those days sawmills would burn down quite regularly, and grandfathers mills were not exceptions to the rule. He would just rebuild them. The present Country Cabins were built during the operation of lumber company. They were the housing for grandfather's mill workers, who came mostly from North Carolina. In 1953 the last mill burned, and we began our journey to becoming today’s Skagit River Resort.

On our In Memoriam page we honor those family & friends, no longer with us, who have helped us along the way.

If you would like to learn a little more about the history of the Upper Skagit area, please check these links out: The Skagit River Journal, Settlement Patterns in the North Cascades

Contact

Local telephone: 360-873-2250    Toll-free: 800-273-2606    Fax: 360-873-4077

Postal address

58468 Clark Cabin Road, Rockport, WA 98283 USA

Highway address

Milepost 103.5, North Cascades Highway, Marblemount, Skagit County, Washington, USA