CARLSBORG — The first line of the story read: “The only commercial truck farm in the Dungeness valley has been developed and is run by a woman . . . Mrs. Ted Schott.”
That would be Mary Schott, supplier of fresh peas, corn, potatoes, blueberries and more to Sequim, Seattle, Tacoma and Victoria.
The then-44-year-old wife and mother was the subject of an Aug. 28, 1964, article in the Port Angeles Evening News, the precursor to the Peninsula Daily News.
On Monday, Schott’s children gathered in Carlsborg to celebrate their mother’s 89th birthday.
And Schott, though surprised, glowed as she talked about her salad days.
Throughout the 1960s, Schott and her three daughters, then just entering their preteen and teen years, worked 40 acres of land near the Dungeness River.
The Schott farm had begun as Mary’s garden around 1960, and grew so big that she made a business out of it.
Then as now, the grower credits the rich Dungeness-fed soil for her success.
Schott said she had never gardened before planting that first plot at her home off Macleay Road.
“It’s just this good ground, and lots of water,” she said in the summer of ’64.
“Anybody in this valley can grow anything. You don’t need a green thumb.”
Schott quit farming and sold her land in 1971, because she could not find enough people to help plant, weed and harvest.
Sitting in the sunshine at her kitchen table on Monday, she recalled how in the early years, she had hire a crew of 40 or more high school students.
“They were like family.
“I could depend on them,” she said. “But as the years went on, the kids didn’t really want to do it. I couldn’t get good workers.”
Schott’s late husband, Ted, worked from dawn to dusk at construction jobs all over Clallam County.
And she had four grown sons, Ron, Rich, Bob and Bill Stipe, who were away at college or busy with their own jobs.
The three girls, however, worked alongside their mother, picking hundreds of crates of peas, beets and potatoes, hoeing and weeding and helping transport the produce all over the region.
There were not farmers markets on the North Olympic Peninsula then, so the Schotts loaded up their pickup truck and drove hundreds of crates of crops to Lehman’s market in downtown Sequim, to the ferry dock in Port Angeles for shipping to Vancouver Island and to the cities on the other side of the Hood Canal.
The family also ran a produce stand in front of their house.
“We learned a strong work ethic,” said Linda Simpson, at 56 the eldest.
“We still work hard,” added the youngest, Mary Lehman, who has been a waitress at the Three Crabs restaurant in Dungeness for 18 years.
Kristy Cook, the middle daughter, shakes her head and smiles at the memory of picking potatoes, weeding carrots and planting perfectly straight rows of peas.
“We couldn’t wait to get off the farm,” Cook admitted.
“But we learned a lot of survival skills.”
Two parental refrains they remember well: Do it right the first time. And if you’re thinking about doing a job halfheartedly, don’t do it at all.
Cook, now a retired rural mail carrier who worked in Raymond, Pacific County, brought her sisters together for Monday’s celebration.
Advice to farmers
What might Schott say to the people who want to run small farms on the Peninsula?
“They’re going to find out that it’s a lot of work,” she said. They will learn something else: “It’s rewarding to work in the soil.
“It was hard. But I enjoyed every minute of it.”
And growing vegetables ¬– “I could eat all the peas I wanted,” Schott said — kept the family healthy.
“People were sad when we quit the business,” she added, since they could no longer get vegetables fresh from the field.
A new crop of farmers — from 30-something couples to fiftyish retirees — is returning to the place that nourished Schott’s family and her customers.
Nash Huber of Nash’s Organic Produce farms a piece of the Dungeness land they sold a generation ago.
And a few yards from Schott’s dusty-pink house is the Sequim Prairie Grange Hall.
The hall, at 290 Macleay Road, happens to be the distribution point for www.Sequim.LocallyGrown.net.
Some 40 growers use the Internet to market the Dungeness Valley’s greatest hits, just as Schott used to do: Nash’s has carrots, the Lazy J Farm has potatoes, and a slew of small farmers offer the fruits born of rich soil and labor.
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
