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Gone By The Wayside

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COURTESY OF MICHAEL MASLAN Then: Marysville’s typical pioneer business district on First Avenue was ultimately moved when the automobile first began to upset the old arrangements in the 1920s. COURTESY OF JEAN SHERRARD Now: The old “Main Street” is “fronted” by the rear wall of the Marysville Mall.

THANKS TO the popularity of "real photo postcards," we have faithful historical views of most communities nationwide. The first years of the 20th century were the time of greatest enthusiasm for such collecting, and this record of the old Marysville business district on First Avenue is postmarked 1913.

The three-story Marysville Hotel on the right is impressively fronted with an open veranda. If the people standing at its second floor were not preoccupied with the unnamed "postcard artist," they might have looked a little way south across First Avenue to the Marysville waterfront on Ebey Slough — or two blocks west to the tracks that first brought trains to town in 1889.

That was the old Marysville. Walt Taubeneck's mother recalled for him how, when the Pacific Highway first entered Marysville in the 1920s on Third Avenue, "First Avenue wasn't cutting it. It was built for boats and the railroads, not automobiles. One by one the businesses moved north."

Taubeneck, an expert on the history of Snohomish County logging, is a stalwart of the Marysville Historical Society. His friend, Arthur Duborko, is another. In 1922 the Duborko family was living temporarily in the Marysville Hotel when it burned down. The 7-year-old and his cousin were playing marbles before school. After someone yelled "fire upstairs!" the boys dropped their marbles and started throwing furniture out the window. The quick-thinking second-grader went on to become Marysville's mayor.

Marysville was founded in the 1870s as a trading post for the Tulalip Indian Reservation. Now its citizens shop at the Tulalip Mall or the Marysville Mall, whose unadorned rear wall, seen here on the right of the "now" view, fronts First Avenue west of State Street.

Paul Dorpat specializes in historical photography and has published several books on early Seattle.