Dee Barnhart

The household already contained several children. Harry E. Jones was a half-brother, followed by brother Jay and sisters Rilla and Dora. In 1902, Dee was presented with a little book in which the older sisters wrote endearing comments, the last of which is dated 1911.

In 1908, Dee and his older brother Jay were fishing. Dee was 10 at the time, and Jay was 18. Jay fell into the river. Dee reported that he had seen Jay come to the surface once. Dee grabbed a tree limb and extended it toward Jay, but Jay could not reach it. Men from a nearby sawmill dropped their work and came to the rescue, but by the time they found Jay he had drowned. Dee somewhat blamed himself for several years afterward.

Working on the railroad, age 16

In 1911, Dee's father, Sylvester, was killed in a railroad accident near Long Lake Dam. Dee went to work doing odd jobs wherever he could, being only 14 years old or so at the time, and now being the eldest son. He attended school as much as he could, but finally went to work on the Northern Pacific Railroad in April of 1913 for $45.00 a month. Work on the railroad was hard, hot in the summer and cold in the winter, somewhat grueling for a sixteen-year-old.

Three years later, he went west to the Puget Sound area. That area is famous for being rainy, but the winters are much more mild than on the east side. He said that he arrived in Everett fifteen days after the I.W.W. union ("Wobblies" - - as in "I Wobblya Wobblya") had a major riot (the "Everett Massacre" Nov. 5, 1916) on the waterfront. He said that he went down and saw the bullets embedded in the office and the dock.

The Marysville bunch. Dee is second from left in the rear; his mother is the large lady to the right of Dee.

After Dee went west to Everett and Marysville, he went to work for the Great Northern Railway. He lived with half-brother Harry Jones and his wife Lottie for several months. Harry was killed in an accident on March 1, 1917. Their mother brought the rest of the family from Davenport to Marysville in the summer of that year. He left the railroad to help in the war effort at the Bremerton Navy Yard and then spent a month working for a local industry as a "fireman". ("Fireman" meant someone who stokes fires in boilers.) In March of 1918 he joined the Army and was sent to France with the 31st Engineers. His letters indicated that he hated army life at first, but later on they became more cheerful. He never saw any "action", and the armistice was signed on 11/11 at 11:00, as he was fond of saying. He returned home to Marysville in 1919 just in time to be quarantined because his younger brother Lloyd had contracted smallpox.

Harry Jones and either Dee or Jay, hunting for food

He continued to support his mother as best he could with only a grade-school education. Between 1913 and 1934, he kept a record in his own handwriting of every one of the 14 jobs he had, and four periods of unemployment. He was a trackman ("gandy dancer"), a rigger aboard tugboats and fishing boats and at the Bremerton Navy Yard, and a stoker ("fireman") at manufacturing plants. In the depths of the Great Depression, about 1931, he was unemployed for 2 1/2 years. He and his brother Lloyd went into business cutting firewood and then digging wells. He had lots of spare time and spent some of it gardening, and some of it playing the harmonica and raising ,um, er, heck(?). (And therein lie some stories.) When he wasn't working with Lloyd, he went into the mountains to trap fur-bearing animals, mostly beaver. He became an expert woodsman but had his fill of it. Later in life, his idea of camping was a cabin on a lake with a Coleman stove, not a tent and a campfire. (After he retired, though, he went on many hikes in the mountains with his wife Marie and sometimes with brother Lloyd.)

He supported several nieces and nephews from time to time. Blanche and Howard, Rilla's children, moved in after Rilla died in the 1918 'flu epidemic. Lloyd lived with them until sometime after he graduated from high school in about 1924. Dee had only a grade-school education, so he was a common laborer all his life. He made sure that his brother and nephew went to high school so life wouldn't be quite as hard for them.

Dee with his banjo.
Marie seated in front.

Dee played the banjo. Nieces and nephews recall sitting on the back porch in Marysville on warm evenings and singing along with "I've Been Working On The Railroad" and other old favorites. Dee also played the harmonica, which he often did at community dances. As one of FDR's "make-work" projects, someone came up with a pile of scrap metal (tin siding) and had a crew build a community hall referred to locally as the "tin can" or simply "The Can". This being the Great Depression, people would dance since there wasn't much else to do. The people who had money would go on Saturday nights with a "regular" band, but the poor folks went on Friday nights and made their own music. Dee played the harmonica with the Friday-night band. Whether he ever took his banjo is not known; he may have had to pawn it for grocery money. Dee taught his nephew Earl Miller to play the harmonica, and Earl would sometimes play with the band. Polkas and Schottisches were all the rage at the time. Because this little Friday-night band was unpaid, it sometimes dwindled down to Dee and Earl and their harmonicas. Earl recalls that sometimes Dee would leave him up there alone, and Dee would go dance with the girls. To make a long story a bit shorter, Dee would often dance with Mary "Marie" Herd and in about 1933 began dating her. He was about 35 years old and unemployed, and she was only 17 and working as a domestic servant.

Dee went to work at the Navy Yard in Bremerton, WA, 40 miles from home, and stayed with his sister Gladys and her husband Wyatt Millikan in Moneta. Wyatt was an upholsterer at the Navy Yard for many years. In August, 1934 Dee left his job at the Navy Yard to be closer to his mother when she became seriously ill and died within the month. (We have a hunch that he also missed Marie terribly because they were madly in love by this time.) The dependent children in both generations had grown up, so his family responsibilities were greatly decreased. In November of 1935, he returned from the mountains with enough furs that he and Marie could get married. They found the cheapest ring at the cheapest jeweler. When they went to Everett to get the marriage license, they did not know that witnesses were required, so Dee asked two old ladies sitting on a bench at the courthouse and they were delighted to sign as witnesses. Dee and Marie were married in Seattle on Nov. 25 at the home of some friends. (All of this seems rather odd, but there is evidence that Marie, um, "kept house" for Dee and Lloyd after Dee's mother died. This was deduced from remarks that Marie made late in life. So if they were living together, it would make sense that they would not have a big public ceremony.)

Marie immediately went to work again as a domestic servant for a local family. One evening the man of the house remarked at dinner that Weyerhaeuser was hiring. Marie finished cleaning up and rushed home and said, "Dee, they're hiring down at the mill. You need to be there first thing in the morning." He was hired and held that same job until he retired. He also helped Marie's brother George get a job there.

His little family, about 1950.

Their first child, Betty Dee, was born the following year but died soon afterward. Another child, a boy, was born prematurely and lived only a few minutes. Along came World War II and the rationing of food, gasoline and other necessities. Dee was overjoyed when Richard was born in February of 1944 and the family's sugar ration was increased. He spent a lot of time with Richard, taking him fishing and on vacation trips, even going as far as being the cubmaster for Pack 36 in Snohomish. He encouraged his son to get all the education he could, since he had not had the opportunity and knew how hard life could be without it.

A builder was building houses along Cedar Street, and someone who had ordered a house was unable to complete the deal, so Dee and Marie bought the little house. It was very nice for a couple, even a couple with a baby, but Marie was afraid that a child could wander into the street or onto the railroad tracks two blocks away -- either that, or drown in the Quil Ceda, a creek that ran some distance away.

In 1947, Dee found a five-acre farm at the end of a dead-end road near Snohomish, where he could "raise a boy," as he put it. He lived there for the rest of his life. He had found a job as a boom man (on the log booms) at the large Weyerhauser mill in Everett, from which he retired many years later. His life was very hard through many of the years that others would consider "childhood". Although he worked hard and paid for the farm in only six years, life was much better for him with a steady job and a little family that always incuded at least one dog and several cats. He was frequently seen going about his chores in his khaki shirt and trousers (his "uniform" as he called it), his characteristic wide-rimmed straw hat on his head and a cat perched on his shoulder and a dog at his heel. At family reunions, there were always a couple of nieces who would come running and throw their arms around his neck, squealing "Uncle Dee!" This behavior was a mystery to the younger ones until much later when we learned how he had given so much of himself to the family years before. At this writing, the third and fourth generations are still using "Dee" as the middle name of their children (Ethan Dee Barnhart, Lloyd's great grandson, born in August, 2001).

After Dee retired, he went hiking during the summers, raised an acre or so of dahlias, and, in the winter, he separated, sorted and traded dahlia tubers with other dahlia lovers. He and Marie were leaders for a group of Horizon Girls.

Dee died after his 34th anniversary dinner on Nov. 25, 1969. He had raised three families, although he had only one wife; he had been through one World War and suffered through the Great Depression and another war; and finally life became good for him. He died suddenly of a heart attack, with his wife and many friends nearby. He is greatly missed by his wife, his son, numerous nieces and nephews, and his two grandchildren whom he never saw.