MARYSVILLE – When Whiskey Ridge was earning its name, Walt Bailey stashed moonshine in a tree stump along the road in the hills above this town.
He and a friend met all those years ago to drink the homemade whiskey made from mashed corn and fermented in an illegal still deep in the woods.
“It tasted good,” Bailey, 87, said. “We didn’t drink it to get saturated. We just took a sip or two to taste it.”
Decades after Prohibition ended, the stills, bootleggers and federal agents hunting them are gone, but the Whiskey Ridge name remains.
On Monday, the Marysville City Council was expected to finalize annexation of 400 acres of Whiskey Ridge, the spine of land that runs from Arlington to Snohomish. An adjacent 1,100 acres known as Sunnyside are included in the Marysville plan.
The annexation is scheduled to become effective Dec. 1, Mayor Dennis Kendall said.
Few of the city’s new residents will have the long connection that Bailey and his wife Verla, 79, have to the area.
“I guess we’re the last remaining pioneers of Whiskey Ridge,” she said.
The couple – married for 59 years – remembers a time when alcohol stills blew up and when federal agents patrolled the county during Prohibition.
She was born there. He moved to the area in 1935.
Today, they look out of their Whiskey Ridge home and see what the next era is bringing.
Across the street, subdivisions are creeping their way toward the small, rural home where the couple has lived since 1950.
It wasn’t always like that.
She was born at home, the youngest of 10 children, on a 40-acre farm.
Her father had a cow and chickens, “enough to sustain us during the Depression years,” she said.
She remembers the still her father ran in the woods behind her home.
He used to conceal whiskey bottles in an oatmeal box to run them to a friend in Marysville.
“Just in case the feds came along,” Verla Bailey said.
The federal agents – revenue men – once arrested her brother.
Even in jail, he brewed up a type of liquor: prune wine.
Another story she remembers was when the still blew up. Alcohol stills were volatile pieces of equipment. Mashed corn was heated and the alcohol extracted. If the brewer wasn’t careful, the whole thing could explode.
Walt Bailey’s parents didn’t make moonshine, but they did make blackberry-and-beet wine, which his mother kept in a 10-gallon jug behind the stove.
He wasn’t above drinking a sip or two of moonshine.
Far from tasting like battleship fuel, Walt Bailey said, the hooch went down smooth.
“I can’t describe it, really – a good-tasting whiskey,” Walt Bailey said.
He and his family moved to Whiskey Ridge from Everett in 1935. They built a home with timber, metal sheets and nails scavenged from a Sumner Iron Works garage that was blown over in a windstorm.
In 1940, the government brought a piece of modernity to the home.
“One day, I came home and they put electricity in,” he said.
Although the large agricultural land parcels have been chopped up over the years, the pace of development on Whiskey Ridge is expected to accelerate with annexation.
That’s when developers likely will line up with new subdivision proposals.
Five-acre lots could be worth as much as $2.5 million, real estate agents have said.
Far from fighting the encroaching development, the Baileys are hoping to cash in.
They are trying to sell the nearly 14-acre parcel they own near the corner of Getchell Road and 83rd Avenue NE and build a new home on a relative’s property further south on Whiskey Ridge.
In 1950, the Baileys bought their land and a 24-foot-by-24-foot cottage for $1,350 cash, Verla Bailey said.
Today, the property and the home are listed for $4.3 million.
And that would buy a lot of moonshine.
Reporter Jackson Holtz: 425-339-3437 or jholtz@heraldnet.com.
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