Photos courtesy of Sammamish Valley Alliance
Sustainable Farming
The Sammamish Valley is rich in farming tradition By Laura Guido
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lthough Woodinville is known for its abundant winery tradition, the area has much deeper roots as a rich and fertile land for farming. Thousands of years ago, a huge glacial ice sheet – known as the Puget Lobe – cut into the hillside to create the Sammamish Valley, according to the online state history encyclopedia History Link. The lobe deposited in its wake clay, sand and till, which remains one of the reasons the valley 44 | Woodinville Magazine / July/August 2021
still has some of the most fertile soil in the state. “It’s just fabulous,” Sammamish Valley Alliance President Thomas Quigley said of the soil. The nonprofit alliance was created to increase education about local, sustainable agriculture in the region. Quigley said the richness of the ground is also thanks to past seasonal flooding of the Sammamish River. Native Americans, including a subgroup of the Duwamish Tribe, successful-
ly farmed the river’s bottomlands for years, according to History Link. Non-native settlers eventually began heavily logging the area, leading to an economic boom in the 1880s. However, by the 1920s, the old-growth forests had been destroyed, and the local timber industry dwindled away. One wealthy Woodinville resident, Frederick Stimson, had profited in logging and later began a high-tech continued on page 46
