___________________On June 20th, Deputies Seidel and Latimer answered a call at the A.C. Frye & Co. at the foot of Pike St. and Railroad Avenue and arrested Joe Metland and W. H. Tulip. [Ed's note: I grew up near Railroad Avenue, where both sides of the tracks were "the wrong side." However, there is no Pike Street in downtown Kent. The name must have been changed sometime between 1929 and 1960].
Joe Metland was selling at the time to A. C. Frye & Co. 27 Rhode Island Red pullets and 5 Rhode Island hens that were taken the night before from Mr. Robert Wooding. R.F. D. 1, Auburn.
Metland admitted taking the chickens and showed the place where he had taken them.
He also admitted taking chickens from H. J. Hart, July 15th, 1929. They took 44 springers. They took 29 colored hens and nine light hens from Mr.s George C. Clark July 18th at night or the morning of the 16th.
Metland showed all three of these places and admitted that he and Tulip together stole the chickens. Tulip does not admit it.
The man that weighed in the chickens and bought them at Frye's from Metland and Tulip is Steven Elson, at the intersection of Railroad Avenue and Pike Street. The bookkeeper is L. Magerstrom at the same place.
On July 15, 1929, Deputies Frank Seidel and Latimer answered a call on Ninth Ave So. between King and Weller [Ed's note: This seems to refer to a Seattle address] to a Mr. shoemaker's Poultry House. They found two men, one giving his name as C. H. Brandon, which is not his true name.
His true name they learned is Lawrence Frisco. The other man gave his name as Dae Hodgins. They had a Dodge truck and a crate of chickens with about twenty Rhode Island Reds and one or two speckled chickens in the bunch.
These chickens, we learned later, belonged to a Mr. Farnscomb, Route 11 Box 526. They arrested the two men and took Frisco to jail: and took Hodgins with them in the car.
Hodgins took them to Mr. Farnscombs place and showed where they had gotten the chickens the night before and poisoned two dogs. One of the dogs belonged to a Mr. Gills and the other one to Mr. Harber -- both across the street from Mr. Farnscombs. They used weenies with arsenic to poison the dogs and have some of the weenies as evidence. They are kept in the county morgue ice box. . . .
On July 10th they went to Wid Evans and stole eight chickens and poisoned the dog. Evans lives at Rt 3 Box 195, Kent.
About June 17th they stole 26 Rhode Island Reds and used sulphur to take the chickens from Mrs. M. C. Smith. Rt 1 Box 133, Auburn, Washington.
On June 19th they took 35 chickens and used sulphur in this case from Al Glenn, Auburn Fish Hatchery, Auburn, Washington.
On the 6th of July, they entered Mr. C. G. Hunter's Rt. 3, Kent and took 30 chickens the first time. On July 8th they got 15 chickens and cut the fence and poisoned three dogs using hamburgers and strychnine.
One June 24th they went to John De Leo's place, Rt 2 Box 92, Renton, Wash., and took 43 mixed chickens and drained the gas tank of his car.
A day or two after that they poisoned a dog in Coalfied of Mrs. L. E. Peterson and drained their gas tank and also poisoned a dog there belonging to Louise Meramakos.Mr. H. Tuttle, Rt. 11 box 525, Seattle, had a pet rooster that he gave to Mr. Farnscomb and this rooster was stolen with the fifty hens, July 15th, from Farnscomb's and was identified by Mr. Tuttle and Mr. Farnscomb at Mr. Shoemaker's Poultry House in Seattle on july 15th. mr. and Mrs. Farnscomb identified the chickens. The man that bought the chickens from them or weighed them in is Leo Haverty, 508 9th Ave. So. and the bookkeepers name, who reported by phone to Mr. Latimer, is C. A. Toppenfus, 508 9th Ave So.
On the 16th day of May, Eugene Johnson and Jack Powell and Lawrence Frisco went to Samuel Stewarts, Rt. 2, Bothell, and took 3 white Leghorns and a kit of tools from a new Ford car, a grease gun and crank with 25 cents worth of potatoes and a new spare tire.
On July 15th, when Deputies Seidel and Latimer arrested Laurence Frisco and Dave Hodgins, they searched their car and found in the right hand side pocket two thirds of a bottle of strychnine which Hodgins told the deputies was the strychnine that was used to poison Farnscomb's dog. He told them that he rented a house form Mrs. Johnson at Coalfield Washington. They proceeded to this place and he showed them the remainder of Mr. Farnscomb's chickens and also thirteen chickens that belonged to Mr. H. H. Hunter, Kent.
Click to enlarge this photograph of a pond and house 24804 128th Place SE in the middle 1950s. This site is very close to where my Uncle Romey's doomed "farm" was, and not far from my Great Aunt Ruth's place (about which I remember little except for her amazing fields of blueberries). It is also close to where my fabulous friends Dave Hokit and Maureen Roberts live, near Lake Meridian (which was ringed with one room cabins and fishing shacks when I was young). In his memoir of growing up in West Seattle, the poet Richard Hugo wrote about going on vacation to Lake Meridian every year, renting a cabin, and fishing for trout.
This is what the area surrounding Kent proper looked like when I was growing up. It does not look like this now, even as far out as Cumberland, Black Diamond, Ravensdale, Enumclaw, Lester, Four Corners, or Hobart. Those are the Cascade Mountains in the distance. One thing that hasn't changed: the pale grey to leaden nimbostratus clouds that have hung over my head most of my life.
Another flood in the Green River Valley. When I saw growing up, we had floods in the Valley every year. The valley was fed by several rivers. The White River and the Green River flowed out of the Cascade foothills to the east, and joined in a confluence near downtown Auburn. From there, the river traveled north and was met by the Black River (an outflow from Lake Washington) near what is now Tukwila. The combined rivers formed the Duwamish River which flowed (and still does) north into Elliott Bay.
South of the White/Green river confluence, was the Stuck River which flowed to Commencement Bay in South Puget Sound. The Stuck and the White rivers flowed so near to each other that during spring floods, the two rivers would sometimes merge, spilling water far to the north and south.
I grew up two blocks from the Green River. The floods never reached our house, but usually came right up to the block before ours. I do remember seeing moving vans roll up and haul people's furniture away when a flood was about to strike. That would be for people who could afford it. Most of us poor folk couldn't. We hung in, got out our prams and dinghies, and crossed our fingers. The floods ended in 1962 when the Howard Hanson dam was built upstream:
The Howard Hanson dam. The dam was built to save the farmers, and us, the hapless lowland residents of Kent. What really happened was that the valley was now safe for industry. And the rest, as they say, is history.
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The immigrants were mostly European. There were, even as I was growing up, several Italian families still farming the valley. The 1900 census count shows 13 Japanese families in and around Kent. 
