By BRUCE HAULMAN, KAREN BORELL & TERRY DONNELLY
For The Beachcomber
Nestled in a deep ravine on the northeast shore of Vashon Island is the quiet, difficult-to-access, seldom-visited Wingehaven Park. It is a site that has been an early post office, a vacation home development, a fish farm and a private estate variously known as Aquarium, Cowley’s Landing, Twickenham, Twickenham Estates, Wingehaven, Northeast Vashon Park and now Wingehaven Park.
The site has dramatic views across Puget Sound to Seattle and Mount Rainier. From 1892 until 1909 it was the site of the Aquarium Post Office with a retired sea captain, fortuitously named Captain Fish, as the postmaster. Certainty in history is sometimes elusive, as there was some question about exactly where Aquarium was located. Cruising on Vashona this summer, I happened to check NOAA Chart 18448, Puget Sound, Seattle to Olympia, and, amazingly, Aquarium is marked on the chart exactly where Wingehaven is located. Mystery solved.
In 1909, the post office closed. It reopened about one mile south, at Glen Acres, in 1914. That same year, William Cowley, a Seattle real estate developer and another self-described former sea captain, purchased the site to create a vacation home site called Twickenham after his reputed home village in England. Cowley built a large home, water gardens, a 200-foot concrete bulkhead and a dock called Cowley’s Landing. There were at least 12 ponds created, one called “Virginia Waters,” a warm-water swimming pool and another called Silent Pool, “the cold water hole.”
Twickenham Estates was developed after Cowley moved his family back to Seattle in 1919. During the boom years after World War I, it was developed to be sites for vacation homes. Although a model bungalow was built, no lots were ever sold and no homes were built as economic hard times hit Vashon during the 1920’s agricultural depression and then the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Ernest Moy purchased the property in the late 1920s and used the ponds to farm fish for sale to aquariums. The 1933 Vashon Island News-Record advertised Twickenham Estates as water gardens with goldfish, scavengers, plants, fish mosses and water lilies for sale. The business flourished, but was continually damaged by spring flooding that would overflow the ponds and wash the fish into the sound. During the 1940s, the property was sold as a private summer residence to Seattle restaurant chain owner William Sanders.
Then, in 1950, Carl Winge purchased the site and renamed it Wingehaven. The Winges remodeled the house, and three generations of Winges owned the property until they sold it to King County in 1969.
In 1995, King County transferred the site to Vashon Park District, and it was renamed Wingehaven Park.
In 1998, the Wingehaven Stewardship Group was formed to help support the park. That same year, Wingehaven became a Washington Water Trails Association campsite, part of the Cascadia Marine Trail that runs from the Canadian Border to Olympia and features over 55 campsites, including Point Robinson and Lisabeula, also on the island.
Wingehaven’s balustrade (cement railing) was vandalized in 1999, destroying many of the poured concrete railings, columns and urns. The King County Sheriff estimated the damage at $80,000.
The Norman Edson photograph of Wingehaven at its peak around 1930 (top) shows the house in the background to the left and the beach curving north to Dolphin Point on the right. In the foreground are a lily pond and the concrete bulkhead and Italianate balustrade with the Cowley’s Landing dock heading toward the sound on the right.
The 2013 photograph by Terry Donnelly was taken from nearly the same location and shows what remains of this once amazing development. Today, Wingehaven is in poor condition and is rapidly being overgrown. Yet, Wingehaven has the potential to be one of the gems of Vashon Park District’s waterfront parks.
