Rough and Ready
The rugged region of Washington state near Republic is home to a variety of strong-willed residents. The Lembcke family is one example of this independent spirit.

Story by Rob McDonald, Photography by Brian Plonka
The Spokesman-Review

Brian Plonka - The Spokesman-Review A broken drive shaft on Donny CooperÕs pickup truck means his buddies are doing the pushing back to Curlew from a mud bog. For residents of Curlew, Republic and other remote towns in Ferry County, life is simple but filled with joy that most outsiders would never understand. "We're more free out here." -- Donny Cooper, Curlew teenager

To get to Republic from Spokane, you drive 124 miles across Washington's highest mountain pass.

Republic is remote.

Strangers and newcomers stand out like the Western larch that turn yellow on the shaggy-green mountainsides in Ferry County.

On a chilly night, wearing a black-and-red checkered wool coat, a regular face about town walks into the Hitch'in Post restaurant and bar. She greets the bartender by name.

Sandy Lembcke, 29, a seasonal biologist with the U.S. Forest Service sits down and talks about her life.

She's among the remaining few in her high school class who still live in Republic.

"Mostly only those who had strong ties to the land stayed," Sandy said. The others faded away into larger cities with greater anonymity and more jobs.

The people who choose to live here revere the wild lands around them. They walk the mountains where their ancestors walked before them. They hunt and gather in handed-down spots not marked on maps. It's not always an easy life. It's arguably the poorest county in the state; 11 percent of the county population was unemployed last year. But this is home.

The Lembckes are one of a dozen Ferry County families who can trace their roots back to the beginning of non-Indian settlement in northeast Washington.

This is the story of one family's history in what's been called Washington's forgotten corner. Here people favor hardy leather boots that won't tear out in thick woods. The outdoors is more than a weekend hobby. It's a living and a lifestyle.

Sandy is the great-granddaughter of Henry Lembcke, a slight man who left his family in Wisconsin to set up a sawmill in Ferry County. His business carved a foothold in the mountains that's kept most of his descendants in the area.

The old mill is built on a slope, and its rusted smokestack extends 90 feet into the sky. The corrugated tin roof is beginning to cave in, and several worn sheds surround the mill along with piles of metal, scrap wood and unused machinery.

The Lembckes try to guard the place from town artists looking for one-of-a-kind materials to sculpt and carve into something new. An old car chassis looks as if it hasn't been touched in 50 years. Evergreens, the kind that must have tempted loggers for years, encircle the mill.

Sandy's great-grandfather came to Ferry County sometime around 1916.

The region, once the north half of the Colville Indian Reservation, had been opened up to settlement and gold miners since 1896. Like his German grandfather who settled in Wisconsin in 1850, Henry Lembcke started a new life in a new land.

For years, Henry and his three boys trucked out loads of trees. As times changed, the mill protected the family from economic turns.

"That mill means a lot to those men," Sandy Lembcke said. Her grandfather worked there as child. He and his two brothers eventually took it over and put their sons to work harvesting trees. It's been dormant since the mid-'60s. The roof's coming down because of heavy snows and no one's sure what to do.

"I think it would be a shame if that building falls in on all that history," Sandy said.

Without quick repairs, it could lose its historic value. But if they move the mill, it could no longer be registered as a historic site.

Sandy grew up spending time with her family in the woods. Her grandma showed her the best berry-picking spots. The family still drives together in search of berry patches, ghost towns and relics left behind in the mountains.

On a brisk and sunny fall day, the kind when your ears tingle from the cold if you step out of the sunlight, four Lembckes load into a Toyota 4-Runner for an afternoon drive to the steam-powered sawmill.

Jack Lembcke drives them up a bumpy dirt road into the folds of large rocks, evergreens and shade.

John Lembcke, 73, and his son, Jack, sit in front and chat about engines.

Sandy sits in back with her 8-year-old nephew.

Her dad, Jack, works for the Ferry County Roads Department and runs a small-engine repair business out of his home. Her grandfather, John, pulls truckload after truckload of trees out of the mountains with his older brother Richard.

She hasn't seen the mill in years and brings a white bucket to gather shaggy-mane mushrooms that pop up each fall in the wooded hillsides above Curlew. Jack shakes his head in a silent rejection of the inky cap's slimy texture.

Sandy gets out of the four-wheel drive rig and announces she'll be in the woods around the mill. John steps nimbly inside the place where he spent his life.

He stands on the platform where logs were hauled in by chain from the pond and set on a carriage. One man ratcheted a log into place and rode the carriage as it fed a 18-foot log through a spinning 5-foot blade. The spray of sawdust was collected and fed into the boiler.

On a good day in its prime, a seven-man crew could cut 25,000 board feet.

No one wore earplugs back then. John has trouble hearing voices, especially higher-pitched sounds.

He took over as the carriage man when he was 11. Neither he nor his two older brothers graduated from high school and they eventually took over the mill in the '50s. It ran for another 15 years.

The work was brutal.

John still remembers when a logging truck lurched backward as his dad was reaching into the lumber pile and tore his thumbnail half off.

"He just tore it off and went on. What else could he do?" John said.

"I wouldn't mind getting back to it," he said. "I couldn't see breaking in a crew these days. They'd work for a couple days and go back on welfare."

Large timbers stuck into the ground are braced with concrete foundations, just like the day the mill was built. John looks around and points out the broadax marks on the large beams.

"He built it right," he said of his dad. "All by hand. Every damn bit of it." he said. "All they had was a team of horses to help him."

Packrats have left piles of string, canvas and leaves packed into nooks. Old rubber belts as thick as a lumberjack's hand sit in leafy piles under the sawing platform. Another tough winter may push the roof in all the way.

Maybe a millionaire will discover the mill and move it for them, they joke.

The family has talked about moving it to Republic and setting it up in the park for public displays.

"I don't know what I'd do if we moved it," John Lembcke says privately. "I just wish to hell we took a VCR camera of it running."

Chicken soup waits for them on the dining room table prepared by Sandy's mother, Donna Lembcke.

"There's all kinds of people around here," said Donna, 47, who's originally from Wauconda in Okanogan County.

Some people live in the hills without electricity or running water. Some leave the rush of city life behind. One man, as it's going around town, has announced he will shoot anyone who tries to drive on a logging road near his property.

City people try to blend in but usually give themselves away with their "country dumb" ways, Donna said.

Typical out-of-towners make a big deal about the size and freshness of local fruit.

"It's just kind of a fact. You get nice stuff here," Donna said.

Almost everyone has a vegetable garden, cans and picks berries in town. Their mothers generally cooked lots of pies and passed baking knowledge down.

City people buy biscuits in a tube or buy frozen vegetables. They struggle with common sense questions like whether or not they can freeze a pie. Most of them are nice people, just not country-wise, she says.

Old-fashioned wisdom hasn't been able to save families who depended on the mines for work. Hecla Mining Co. shut down in 1994. Vaagen Bros. Timber laid off 100 workers that year.

Out-of-work families had to move to survive.

"It is a scary thing. It's scary to a lot of people," Donna said.

The thought of leaving frightens her.

"Where would I go?" she said. "What would I do?"

Donna's brother has worked at Vaagen Bros. Timber since he was 18. More than once he's pointed a finger of mistrust at his niece, Sandy, a national Forest Service worker.

"He thinks I'm an environmentalist. Like I have special powers to shut down the mill," Sandy said.

"He's just afraid of losing his job," said Sandy's dad.

Few in town have patience for environmental notions of choosing the land over making a living.

But the rules have changed a little.

Take the mill, for instance. If it were running, the smoke emissions wouldn't pass standards. The boiler would need an inspection. A permit would be required to use water from the creek. It no longer has a place except as a relic.

Sandy asks her grandfather what he'd prefer to do with the mill. "Would you rather move it or put it on the historical register?"

"I don't know," John said.

It'd be a major job to move it, at least two years to finish and would take a wad of money that none of them have in the bank.

"There'd be a ton of people who'd buy the hand-hewn timber," Sandy's dad said. "People would kill for those beams."

John keeps eating, looking down at his soup.

In 1947, a small diner by a main road drew large lunch crowds. Located 33 miles west of Curlew in Tonasket, the diner's four booths and seats at the long counter were filled.

A new waitress named LaRue Howell was working her first day. She began taking a man's order before she realized it was her boyfriend.

John Lembcke had come with big news.

He knew she wouldn't marry him until she paid back a loan from her mother. That's why she took a job.

John had just received $500 from his father Ñ an incentive to hurry up, get married and get his mind back on work.

LaRue's first day on the job was also her last.

"Being twitterpated and 19 years old, you do things like that," LaRue said.

They went to Okanogan, got the license and found a justice of the peace in Omak to marry them. Then they drove to Spokane where they stayed for a few days and shopped for furniture.

Henry's three sons, Richard, Robert and John, were all married within three months because of their dad's strong will.

Henry was the kind of guy who'd probably skip pleasantries and take after an encroaching environmentalist with a logging chain, John said.

He once fired his whole mill crew one morning before hiring them back after lunch.

Henry was known for being quiet, shy and a good father. He could be difficult.

Once when Henry fell off a log pile and impaled his thigh, he refused to stay in the hospital. He was laid up at home for months. He worked the mill until he was in his 70s.

"He didn't last long after he retired," said LaRue.

He had a strong influence on his sons.

"Lembcke men are not known for their talkativeness. They talk engines when they do talk," said Sandy. "It's hard to get close to any of them. There's safety in the shop."

The men tend to the machines. The women tend to the home and garden.

"You cooked and cleaned and raised a garden and family," LaRue said.

The isolation may have been too much for John's mother, Faye Lembcke, who married Henry in Wisconsin and moved out West.

She never saw her family again. Her husband worked long hours. Few people lived in the area.

She was a religious woman who could sing, said Ethel Still, John's sister.

"She was depressed, I know," Ethel said.

One day the sheriff came and took Faye to Eastern State Hospital in Medical Lake, which was sometimes called a hospital for the feebleminded.

John still remembers seeing the shiny new Ford driving up to the mill.

"I know where you're taking me," Faye said, as Ethel remembers. John said he remembers running after the car and yelling at them to bring his mother back.

She died later of blood poisoning from a tooth extraction.

It must have been a lonely life for her, LaRue said.

"My dad said she had her house and he had his mill," John said. "I think he was hard to live with and broke all the time."

Ethel still comes back to visit twice a year. Her dad left her 40 acres of wooded area. Her children and grandchildren come to pitch camps on a grassy meadow on her land. Her 21-year-old grandson, a welder in Seattle, wants to build a cabin there and move to Ferry County.

"We're outdoors people," Ethel Still said. That land around the mill, she said, is still home.

Sandy sips a hot apple cider in the Hitch'in Post in Republic. As she talks about the legacy of her family in Ferry County, the buoyancy leaves her voice.

This is her home and it always will be.

"People think I'm crazy for staying here," Sandy said. "People are always telling me, ÔYou have no reason for staying here.' They're usually people who haven't lived here, imports. They're not home-grown, as my cousin Butch would say."

She tried Seattle for five years.

"You walk down the street by people who could care less who you are or what you're up to," she said.

Her boyfriend took her to Alki Point to look at the Emerald City lights.

"It was pretty, but it didn't do anything for me. I'd rather look at stars than city lights, or trees than buildings."

Ferry County's mountains are sacred for Sandy. She had a falling out with her old boyfriend because he violated an unwritten rule by bringing city people back to enjoy the country comforts. It burned her.

"Don't use this place to get friends, especially yuppie friends," she said.

Sandy eventually went to college at Washington State University. The partying students, including her upstairs neighbors, drove her nuts.

She'd sneak out of her apartment during their parties and cut their power at the fuse box.

"They never knew what happened," she said.

During summers, she worked for the Forest Service and discovered how much she missed these mountains.

"Nothing else gives the feeling," she said. "Shopping doesn't even do it."

As a self-described country person, she has strong beliefs about city people.

"The city people come to the country because they think it's cool to do. Fine, enjoy it. But you're not really enjoying it," Sandy said.

"Newcomers think they are connected. They don't have a clue what it means to be country. They think it's something good, so they try it."

They look at nature and the outdoors like outsiders, like foreigners. Country life isn't what they think it is.

She's seen them move to the country and find out that they don't belong.

"I know exactly where I belong," she said. "It's right here. I want these mountains for my children and my grandchildren," Sandy said.

Whether or not the mill is still standing by then, the land will always be there.

Back to Top