Mike Barnhart, who was raised in Snohomish, answered our call last month for historic images of Snohomish by showing up at the Archives room behind the Blackman House Museum, with this month’s amazing image.

No guess work needed to identify it either since the photographer wrote on the barn in the picture: “J. Harvey’s 1884.” It turns out be a rare photograph of the John Harvey hops barn that even his great granddaughter, Donna, has never seen before, and she has done a lot of looking. Her research, combined with that of her father’s, Eldon, documents a fascinating story of a man who sailed from England to San Francisco, then to Seattle where he bought a claim on the shores of Lake Washington that was destroyed in the Indian wars of 1855. He was lucky to get any money for his claim, but sold it for $2000 and eventually bought the claim across the river from the Snohomish town site for $50 in 1859.

For this month’s NOW image, I called on Robert Waltz, owner of the Sea-Sno Mill, for help in figuring out where the Harvey barn might have been located. With only a blurry expanded image of the 1909 flood to go by, we felt that the sawdust collection tower along side the main road into the mill was our best guess.

A mill has been on this site since 1866, which means that if our unknown photographer of the historic image had swung his large camera to the right, then to the left, the additional exposures would be worth thousand of words for us today.