Panel 15 - Strength of Community | the Original Family

Earlier on this Heritage Trail, Panel #3 was titled Family, which taught us that family, as in immediate family comes first, but it’s not all that “family” is or means. Family is much broader. It is the community that we build around us. It is the care we take of each other. It is much broader than what our “blood” defines. It builds and it grows. It is the people we choose.

Early Indigenous peoples of this land, the Chelan Tribes, cared for those along the river, those above and below them. They collaborated, built, shared knowledge, and protected one another. Though times changed and new people arrived, that tradition of neighbors caring for neighbors endured.

As new settlers arrived, many adopted the same spirit of mutual aid and community responsibility, adding their own chapters to the story.

Here, in Manson, we are still small enough to be a “family.” We are still young enough to remember. In almost every sense of the word we care for our “community.” We care for each other's children. We step forward when someone is in need. We rally around a cause. We celebrate together.

The Barkley family still shares stories about Grand Dad and the Wapato sisters, Margaret & Lucy, great friends, gathering to share their own stories, and recording their history. The Koenig family talks about 5 sisters from the Fort family that took their husbands and grew into families that we now know as the Koenigs, the England’s, and the Killian’s. The Bennet family who have created the Apple Blossom crowns since the very beginning. And families such as the Petersons, Leggs, Eichhorns, Peters, Griffiths, still share stories that connect today's community to the people who built it. Five and six generations later, those connections remain strong.

These, and more families, came together as community. Manson’s beautiful Heritage

Tree, put up in the heart of downtown for the 2011 Centennial Celebration, gives tribute

to these founding families.

Together they built houses. Together they laid the groundwork for water which continues to sustain life. Together they formed the co-op that sustained the first through the current orchardists. They came together to dance in the streets, and then to build a community center to bring the dances and basketball games a home, and to build troops to help teach the boys how to “behave.” It was common to “pass the hat” to ensure students going to State had food to eat, and then they formed the Manson Educational Aid program to ensure they could help get the kids to a higher education. This team of families who created “community” didn’t wait. They responded to fire, invested in education, preserved their history, and laid foundations for those who would follow.

This community who shared and cared and built together, was never incorporated like other towns. They did the work themselves. They do it themselves today, still, with a commitment to never lose the quality of life and the COMMUNITY that exists here in our home, Manson, Washington.

As you walk through the streets, people smile and wave. The local shop owners will look up to you like a friend that just walked through the door. They’ll greet you like you belong. They choose each other; they choose you. We treat each other like we belong.

You see that sense of community in the schools, still small and caring for the individual child, where parents and teachers, students and administrators know each other and pitch in to raise the children together.

You see the partnership in the original apple co-op, Manson Growers, and the way the Cider Press grew from it. And the way the vineyards jumped in to support the orchards as change took place.

The sense of care is seen in the community collaborations between organizations like the Manson Merchants who became the Manson Business Association and then became the Manson Chamber of Commerce, who now work collaboratively with the Manson Community Council and Historic Manson Main Street to become the Manson One Voice Coalition, who collaborate with Parks, and the Village Green, and the Grange, and all other civic and municipal organizations in the community. Even the Lake Chelan Boating Club supports the community. What you might not know is that these are all volunteer organizations. People who care about the whole of Manson. If it needs to be done, they do it.

This is Manson: a place where community is not an idea people talk about, but a practice people live. It is remembered in family stories, built into orchards and streets, carried by schools and civic groups, and renewed every time neighbors answer a call for help.

Here, people choose each other. They choose you.

This is the Strength of Community.

*Note: You may notice many obituaries included as resources for some of the families included above. To include resources for family names 5 & 6 generations back took a little digging. But what could be better than the stories the families actually wrote themselves?! We hope you enjoyed this walk down memory lane as much as we did.

Also, thanks to the Lake Chelan Museum, you can also find fabulous pictures and snippets of stories of old right here!