Originally published in the Enumclaw Courier-Herald, October 26, 2011
There was a time when the Plateau was covered with bustling, individual communities.
Most had their own school house, community or dance hall and store. They may have had a church, saloon or specialty shop. Most had a band or baseball team. Some had both.
They were filled with farmers, miners and loggers, most arriving from Europe.
Each community had its own heart and soul.
Those areas still serve as reference points for those who live in the Enumclaw area. Ask many today where they live and chances are they will answer with names like Veazie, Osceola, Wabash, Selleck, Birch, Franklin, Flensted, Cumberland, Boise and Krain.
Many of those pocket communities still sport landmarks and family names from those early days. Osceola’s school house still stands prominently in the middle of farmland. The Newaukum Grange rest quietly in the Wabash area.
One area north of Enumclaw, Krain, is sifting through its past, searching for its soul. It’s stirring with Krain Corner Inn Karen Hatch’s work to get her building on King County’s landmark list and Sacred Heart Catholic Church’s effort to breathe new life into its century-old Holy Family Cemetery.
“Krain has always been family-oriented,” longtime resident Jim Puttman said. “This is where I was born. This is where I want to come back to. It’s been great.”
Puttman’s grandfather came to Krain from Prussia in the 1880s and settled on the 40 acres the family has since called home.
He’s one of many families, more than a century later, who still call Krain home.
“The Austrians usually bought their farms ‘for keeps’ intending to pass them on to their children,” wrote Louise Poppleton in her 1995 edition of There’s Only One Enumclaw. “The Paschich farm will be 100 years old in 1980. Joseph Paschich, Jr. still lives on the farm where he was born in 1892.”
Jim Malneritch is one of them. Five generations have been living on the property his great-uncle and grandfather settled. His father, Martin, was born in 1896.
He has a deed that says Washington Territory, because it was signed a couple of years before Washington became a state.
In her book, Poppleton notes around 1880 immigrants from Austria were attracted by the inexpensive, fertile land in Krain and the work available in the coal mines near Green River.
“In the year 1881, the Math Malneritch and Joseph Paschich families settled on homesteads—coming from California by ocean steamer to Seattle and from there to Auburn by way of small river boats then in use…. The first men in the area later to be called Krain,” wrote Nancy Irene Hall in the book, In the Shadow of the Mountain.
Math homesteaded and purchased from the railroad 300 acres. The story is, the land was completely under water, but he thought with ditches in the right places it could be drained and would be fertile.
Today, the land is still rich in farming.
Hall gathered much of her information for the 1983 book from Courier-Herald clippings and the Pioneer History of Enumclaw by the Women’s Progressive Club.
The Math Malneritch and Joseph Paschich families may have opened the district, but in the next few years the Jones, Puttman, Lochridge, Kump, Parmenter, Blair, Bagby, Verhonick, Iron, Medie and more followed. Many of those names can still be found on mailboxes in the Krain area.
Most filed homesteads, others purchased land from the Tacoma Land Company or the Northern Pacific Railroad, wrote Jean Paschich in 1938.
The local Catholic priest and his friend Math Malneritch named the area Krain, which meant “foot of the hill,” in their native language because it reminded them of the foothills in their hometown in Austria.
As families moved in the community began to take shape.
The one-room Krain school house was built in 1884 on a hill across from the current Krain Cemetery. The Northern Pacific donated the land and families chipped in the materials. At first 24 students attended, but with the increase in immigrant families arriving by 1891 the student population swelled to almost 80.
Among Jim Malneritch’s treasures are a family member’s 1910 Krain School diploma signed by John Lochridge, and photographs of the Krain School classes of 1915 and 1920 that feature Rose Malneritch in them.
He also has a photograph of grandfather Joe and Katherine Malneritch from 1893. In 1903, Joseph Malneritch and John Kochevar started a store in Krain near state Route 169 and Southeast 400th Street, note records from the Enumclaw Public Library. Not long after, Mat Medie and Henry Bellack purchased it. It closed in the 1960s and the building was torn down in the 1970s.
The Malneritches donated five acres on a hill on 400th to build the Holy Family Church in 1889. An acre of land was purchased from Medie for a cemetery titled St. Gall the Abbot.
Between the 1880s and 1930s, Krain was a bustling community made up mostly of Austrian and Slovenian families.
“Everybody helped everybody,” Puttman said. “It was really amazing. I could remember that even when I was young.”
He remembers walking the 1-½ miles to the school house, which sat where Northwest Bible Church rests today.
Puttman recalls serving as an altar boy at Holy Family Church in the early 1930s, where his duties included stoking the fire so the church would be warm during the twice a month Sunday services. Sunday was also popular for baseball games between those from Krain and Black Diamond, Puttman said.
Math Malneritch built a saloon with boarding rooms on the second floor. It was torn down during the Prohibition era.
Prohibition also put an end to the area’s busy hop industry.
“My Dad used to talk about picking hops,” Malneritch said.
At one time, kids didn’t start school until October so they could help in the hop fields.
There were others. Louis Pogorelc started the Krain Tavern, previously the family ran a confectionery. The building still stands near State Route 169.
Puttman also remembers the two ballrooms that were filled with music and dancers on Saturday nights.
“In the early 1930s, three Slovenian lodges built one of the finest ballrooms in the state on the Black Diamond Highway near Krain,” Poppleton wrote.
“As kids I remember hanging over the balcony and watching the adults dance,” said Dorothy Sleigh, whose roots also go back. Sleigh, formerly a Lokovsek, is part of the area’s Slovenian Society. “Dad was musical. He played one of those button-box accordions, trumpet; every community had a band. Every Sunday there was a potluck. Everything shut down but family.”
Sleigh’s dad also came from the old country.
“It’s beautiful country,” she said of the homeland. “I never understood why my Dad left for the United States, but he said it was about freedom.”
He was a coal miner in Cumberland. His first wife, Antonio Tost Lokosvek, was buried at the Krain Cemetery in 1921 at the age of 28.
Sleigh said he put the children in a home and went back to Slovenia to find a new wife, one 22 years his junior.
Like her fellow Slovenian Lodge members, Sleigh has fond memories of those times.
“We get together a few times a year,” she said of the Enumclaw-based lodge which boasts about 35 members.
Krain kept bustling.
Poppleton wrote about exploratory oil wells drilled on Mary Krainick’s and the Fant family’s farms in 1958.
Life rolled on, farming continued in the area and people continued to move in and call it home.
About 50 years ago, the past started to disappear. The church, store and school were torn down, their pieces of history sold off and scattered.
But some remnants like the pictures Malneritch holds dear, the stories from Poppleton and Hall’s books, and the tombstones of those buried at the cemetery are resurfacing raising new interest in one of the Plateau’s oldest communities.
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