a brief history of woodinville
“Brief” may be a relative term — it turns out I have a lot to say on this topic. Best to start at the very beginning.
The area now known as Woodinville is the traditional home of multiple Native American communities including the Sammamish, Duwamish and Stillaguamish peoples, who occupied the area for thousands of years prior to colonial settlement. The city is named after its first European settlers, Susan and Ira Woodin, who claimed a 160-acre homestead in the area in 1871. A community quickly grew up around them to include a post office, a feed store, and various means of transportation along the burgeoning rail system and Sammamish Slough, the slow-moving river that meanders through the valley.
I won’t belabor these early days, except to note the various movements of industry through the Sammamish valley. First, as with many communities in the Pacific Northwest, logging provided building materials and wealth; when those resources had been depleted agriculture came to the area and a few notable families rose to prominence. The DeYoung family opened a feed and produce operation; the Brown and Stimson clans operated dairy farms. Ira Woodin ultimately left his namesake town around the turn of the 20th century to seek his fortune in the Yukon Gold Rush; I haven’t been able to determine when he returned, but he was buried on the one-acre plot of land he and his wife had deeded to the city of Woodinville upon his death in 1919. (That cemetery is still in operation, by the way, smack in the middle of the downtown area; if you happen to find yourself in the Woodin Creek wine district it’s a short walk to this peaceful corner of the city.)
Though Woodinville was surfaced as a candidate for incorporation in 1890 (by resident Mary B. Neilsen Jaderholm, who also happened to be the first person to gain citizenship in the state of Washington after it was granted statehood), the proposition would not be heeded until 103 years later when, in 1993, the community was formally incorporated as a city.
Washington adopted prohibition earlier than some, in 1915. By the time 1933 and the 21st Amendment rolled around, Washingtonians were more than ready for it. Almost as soon as the ink was dry, a winery called National Wine Co popped up and began purveying wines of locally grown loganberry and blackberry (state regulations favored such libations). In 1954 that company merged with another to become American Wine Growers; in 1967 American Wine Growers launched a new brand called Ste Michelle, which marketed wines made from the Vitis Vinifera grape species (from which most prestigious wines are derived). In the early 1970s, the company purchased Fred Stimpson’s dairy, which had since been renamed Hollywood Farm after the many holly trees he’d planted there. The winery building they constructed was modeled after a French Chateau, and the company changed its name to match; Chateau Ste Michelle, to this day the largest Riesling producer in the world.
Often considered the flagship and patriarch of the Woodinville wine industry, the Chateau (as it’s locally called) soon brought in enough tourism for other tasting rooms to crop up in the city; now around 150 and counting. There are no vineyards producing wine in Woodinville (although you’ll see a few decorative plots of grapes around), and in fact the region is poorly suited to grape-growing due to its wet climate. All the viticulture takes place on the other side of the Cascade range, where the rain shadow effect produces some of the best grape-growing climate in the world—but that’s a different story for another blog post.
Woodinville’s wine country provides an accessible touchstone for visitors and residents of Seattle, Bellevue, Tacoma and the other primary municipalities of Puget Sound, allowing them to experience Washington wine country without needing to drive 200 miles over a mountain range. Our unique town offers four core wine districts; Hollywood (named for the Hollywood Schoolhouse, which was named for the Hollywood Farm), Downtown / Woodin Creek (named for the stream that bears Susan and Ira Woodin’s name), the Warehouse District (named for the industrial, garage-style facilities to be found there), and the West Valley (sometimes lumped together with Hollywood but not quite walking distance).
It’s challenging to tell the story of the place you were raised in without making it the story of yourself. To me, born and bred in this once-quiet farming community, it is difficult to separate the relevant details from the esoteric ones; teenage congregations in the Haggen parking lot, Christmastime at Molbak’s and DeYoung’s, the golden light in the valley on a July evening when the sun sets at 9:30pm. Those details have no real place in a narrative of the town’s history, but perhaps they will provide it with a modicum of color. The Woodinville I now know and love is much changed, but for the better; its tasting rooms, breweries, bistros and agricultural centers ring with the toasts of hardworking people who I am proud to call my neighbors.
If you’re interested in visiting one particular Woodinville district on your tour, or making a point of seeing a particular historic location, let us know in your pre-tour survey and we will be delighted to accommodate.
Salut, and enjoy Woodinville!
