Hiram Ellsworth Pearsall and Memories of Long Ago

In 1944, a series of wonderfully written and colorful memoirs entitled Memories of Long Ago written by Hiram Ellsworth Pearsall were published in the Monroe Monitors. These Memoirs have been quoted from extensively in many articles on local history but have not been readily available in their entirety until recently when Nellie Robertson took the time to transcribe them from the original newspapers. They are now in a bound notebook available to the public in the Monroe Historical Society Museum, and the complete series is now posted here on this website:

Part 1: Cry for Water;
Part 2: Salem Woods;
Part 3: Judge Sorenson's Court;
Part 4: Cussin' Oxen;
Part 5: Picking Hops;
Part 6: First County Railroad;
Part 7: Moving of the Post Office;
Part 8: The Shingle Bolt Wars;
Part 9: The Woods Creek Gimlet;
Part 10: "Babe";
Part 11: The First Donkey Engine;
Part 12: The Brick Business;
Part 13: Wagner School District; and
Part 14: That Great Fir Tree.

Pearsall was both an eyewitness to and very much involved with Monroe's early history. He was born on February 5, 1864, in Clinton County Iowa where he spent his youth. He moved to the Monroe area in 1885 and on his twenty-first birthday filed a preemption claim northest of Monroe near the Salem Woods homestead in the Woods Creek Valley. His father, who went blind in 1877 but was otherwise still very active, and his mother joined him the following year. While clearing his land and building up his farm Pearsall worked in the timber camps of the time to earn ready cash. He was also on the surveying crew that laid out the original Monroe townsite in 1892.

In 1890, Pearsall married Annie B. Walters. Her father, H. D. Walters arrived in the Monroe area in 1887 after driving a mule team through from Illinois. He took up a claim cornering Pearsall's. In 1900, Pearsall and his growing family moved to Monroe proper and began a contracting business building businesses and residences in the new town. One of these was the Hotel Pearsall, which he built in 1902 and operated for a number of years before selling it and building the Savoy Hotel in 1909, which he owned for 14 years. It still stands on West Main Street in downtown Monroe as does the Monroe First National Bank Building, which he also built.

Although he moved to Everett in 1904 so his children could attend high school, he remained active in the Monroe business community throughout that time and later moved back to his farm in the Woods Creek Valley.

--from the History of Snohomish County, Washington, edited by W. M. Whitfield, 1926