Mary Low Sinclair

Mary Low, age 11, arrived at Alki Point with the Denny Party in 1851, but while many in that party became Seattle's first settlers, the Low family settled instead in Port Madison in Kitsap County, where Mary worked as a teacher and married her boss, Woodbury Sinclair, the school district clerk and a lumberman, on March 4, 1862. Two years later Woodbury went to Cadyville, the first name for Snohomish, and bought Edson Cady's claim on the north bank of the Snohomish River, including a small shack that he and a business partner later opened as a store for local loggers. Mary, their infant son, and their household goods arrived on May 1, 1865, when she found a small clearing in otherwise unbroken timber, with a rough log house on the bank for supplies and a twelve-by-sixteen-foot shack farther back used as the store, with living rooms in the rear. Their infant son Alvin died 20 days after her arrival, and Mary later recalled that there was no time to be lonesome, as the women made the place homelike with flowers, frogs sang in nearby marshes, mosquitoes drove people to build smudges, wild game was plentiful, Indians brought venison, wild ducks, fish, and clams, and ranchers from Snoqualmie Prairie supplied hams and bacon. At the time of Woodbury Sinclair's sudden death in 1872, the Sinclairs were donating three acres on the eastern edge of their plat alongside the Pilchuck River to establish the county's first graveyard, where Mary placed a three-foot white marble headstone for Woodbury and later moved Alvin's remains there and added those of her second son Clarence in 1905 after his sudden illness.

Snohomish, Washington · United States