In the late 1800s a covered wagon left the Kentucky-Tennessee area, making its way to the Methow Valley carrying Jewell and Nora Ellen Northcott, who eventually became the grandparents of beloved Winthrop resident Donna Martin. After running a halfway station between Benson Creek and Paradise Hill on the old Brewster-Twisp Road, the Northcotts eventually moved to a homestead on the west side of the Chewuch River in 1902, where they farmed corn, potatoes, and alfalfa. “There was no irrigation,” Donna says. “You had to depend on rain.”
As children, Donna and her two brothers spent many happy hours on that Chewuch homestead, as well as on the homesteads of two great uncles up in Mazama. “Uncle Alvie Sharp lived just above where the store is today, and Uncle Guy Sharp was about two or three miles up the road towards Harts Pass across from Goat Wall,” Donna says. “They raised hay and cabbage, which they sold to the grocery store.”
One of Donna’s favorite memories was summer nights spent sleeping in the cabbage patch with rifles, protecting the cabbage from the deer.
It was rural life, and not always easy, but it was all that they knew, Donna says. “Can you believe it, all that time growing up, we didn’t get hot water and a bathroom until I was 16 years old?” Indoor plumbing, telephones, televisions, commercial flight — all that came to American households during Donna’s lifetime.
The flood of 1948 was a seminal event in Donna’s life. “It wiped out everything,” she says. “My mom and brothers and I were on the hill on the flats above the town and we watched a big pine tree just stand up in the river and float downstream and take the entire bridge with it.”
“Sometimes we had snowstorms that put 5 or 6 feet of snow on the ground. And we had fires, but they didn’t seem as devastating in those days. It was a lot of hardship and a lot of work, but when people put their mind to do something, they stayed with it until it was done,” Donna says. “Neighbors just worked through those tough times together. They helped each other. It was just part of who the people of the Methow Valley are.”
The polio epidemic of the 1950s presented more hard times for the valley, since nine out of 10 of those paralyzed by polio never recovered. “One of the neighbor kids, Lewis Dibble, contracted polio,” Donna says. “He spent months at Children’s Hospital in Seattle. When he got home, we kids saw him in an iron lung, and later we pulled him all around town in a red wagon.”
Later, when the oral polio vaccine became widely available, Donna and her three oldest sons received the vaccine on sugar cubes at the Brewster hospital.
Donna’s abiding love was her husband, Tom Martin, whose grandparents lived on the same country lane as Donna’s. “My grandparents had eight children and his grandparents, the LaRues, had six, so we had to make sure none of them had married each other before we started dating!’ Donna says.
To learn more about Donna Martin and her family’s homesteading days in the Methow, contact the Shafer Museum at staff@shafermuseum.org.
