(playful music) - [Knute] The Pacific Northwest has had many symbols, the salmon, the orca, the iconic mountains, even Sasquatch.

But at one time, there was a more humble symbol, something ubiquitous.

It represented change, frustration, hope, and pride.

Let's remember our Northwest roots with the tree stump.

(upbeat music) Known for its forests, the northwest had appealed for its moderate climate and fertile lands.

Indigenous People had been cultivating crops and game with periodic burnings to promote the growth of berries, camas root, and oak prairies.

But when settlers poured into the region they were dazzled by the forests, which they fell upon to chop down, to build with, and for lumber to sell.

Cleared areas for cultivation were comparatively scarce.

So homesteaders sought to raise the forest for farming and grazing land, but that often left them with fields of stumps.

Massive stumps, endless stumps.

These rugged allotments were called stump farms.

You know those souvenir postcards showing giant fruit or potatoes or ears of corn on flat cars?

They were a joking way to show off a region's pride in its abundance.

Here, we didn't need fake photos.

Real photos of real trees in their stumps showed what the pioneer class faced: trees so big they could only be felled one or two stories above the ground by loggers with whipsaws and axes, standing on springboards.

You can still see some of those springboard notches on old growth stumps today.

The logs and stumps from mammoth furs, spruce, and cedars became trophies of pioneer era industriousness.

While we might weep over these fallen giants today, postcards and images once featured people standing next to felled big timber, much like someone might pose with a record size fish.

As forests came down, fast fields of stumps couldn't easily be removed.

What do you do with the stumps of trees so huge and so deeply rooted in the soil?

You could burn them.

You could dig, chop, and pry them out, or haul on them with horse and oxen.

Some took a shorter route: Dynamite.

An exploding stump could be dangerous.

Dexter Horton, a Seattle pioneer, an early banker is said to have stopped by a stump being burned.

He decided to warm himself by the fire, when an unexploded shell from the US Navy worship Decatur, that was apparently lodged in the stump, exploded and knocked him down.

Perhaps a lesson was learned.

He later built a fireproof bank that survived the great Seattle fire of 1889.

Stumps were not unusual in growing frontier cities.

Portland was nicknamed Stumptown during its expansion in the mid 1800s.

Portlanders are said to have hopped from stump to stump to avoid the mushy, rain soaked ground, if need be.

Ingeniously, some found uses for the larger stumps.

One in the Olympic Peninsula's ELWA Country was turned into a post office in the 1890s.

Another in Tacoma's Wright Park had stairs installed and became a kind of observation platform, a kind of early space needle.

People danced on stumps, played music on stumps, performed acrobatics and posed for family photos on stumps.

Near Olympia, some enterprising guys turned a giant stump into a barn for their livestock.

Massive cedar stumps often had hollow or soft interiors at the base.

Why let them go to waste?

Why not carve out some space and move in?

In Vancouver, BC, someone built a three room stump house, much easier than throwing up a log cabin.

The most famous stump dwelling was the Edgecomb House in Snohomish County near Arlington, Washington.

It was hollowed out by the Lindstrom family, Swedish immigrants who moved west.

They put a roof on, installed a window, a stove.

They used it as a temporary home until they could build a more permanent one.

Photographers including the prolific Darius Kinsey took pictures of it and they sold as postcards.

You could say that in the early 20th century the Edgecomb Stump House went viral.

It was eventually dismantled and lost to old age.

There's still a stump house in Arlington, though, that stands at the Stillaguamish Valley Pioneer Museum.

A spectacular kind of stump house was shown at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo in 1901.

It was a hollowed out fir from Everett, that stood 10 feet high, 13 1/2 feet in diameter, and could hold 65 people.

The scale dazzled visitors who learned that Washington boasted of inexhaustible forests.

Even more exotic, was a multi-story stump house with a spiraled staircase, planned for the 1909 Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition in Seattle.

It was never built, but offered a kitchen, porch living room, fireplace, and of course, cedar flooring.

Along with the old-fashioned woodsy fragrance of pioneer days.

Alas, such fares often promise more than they deliver.

So there are no flying cars yet to travel to your luxury stump house home.

Back in the day, a shorthand way to say the Northwest was a remarkable place was to feature a stump so big you could live in it.

A stump house could make our rainy region seem habitable, even cozy, as if we were snug Hobbits tucked into a landscape of forest giants, even while we were chopping them down.

(romantic music) - [Narrator] Hear more about this episode on the Mossback Podcast.

Just search Mossback wherever you listen.