Cultivated by Native Americans and claimed by 19th-century settlers, Ebey’s Landing, a flat swath of a Pacific Northwest island, remains a triumph of nature.

BY DAVID LASKIN

NPS Photo

It’s hard to say whether the first white families at Ebey’s Landing were thinking about the view when they chose to bury their dead on this rise in the 1850s. But today, the spectacle of land and sea from Sunnyside Cemetery on Whidbey Island is the first thing you think about, and the more it gets inside you, the harder it is to tear yourself away. In a countryside of magnificent vistas, this one brings the whole picture together—beauty, history, and deep rich soil. Clearly, it’s a cemetery not to be missed. Get yourself to the old village of Coupeville in the middle of Whidbey, a seahorse-shaped fragment of Washington state about two hours north of Seattle by highway and then ferry or bridge. Drive, or better yet walk, a mile west across the skinny waist of the 38-mile-long island. Ascend the gentle rise of Sherman Road into the stand of gnarled firs that shadow the oldest part of the cemetery. With your back to the gravestones, scan the fields of barley, wheat, corn, alfalfa, hay, and vegetables grown for their seeds until you spy near the water’s edge a frail gray wood structure, weathered to the verge of collapse under its mossy shake roof.

This is Ebey’s Prairie, a square mile of open grassland that the island’s first white settler, Isaac Ebey, claimed in 1850, back when the U.S. Congress was giving 320 acres to every male citizen over 18 who arrived in the Oregon and Washington territories and another 320 acres to his wife. The conformation of the land has changed little since then. The fields look the same but for the kinds of crops they grow. Here is the essence of American pastoral, with one sublime bonus. Ringing the field is some of the most memorable scenery in the West: two major mountain ranges (the Cascades to the east, the Olympics to the west), two enormous volcanoes (Mount Rainier a faint white cone to the south, Mount Baker a jagged tooth of snow to the east), and opening out to the north and west the wide saltwater of Admiralty Inlet and the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

Yet it was the northwestern half of Ebey’s square mile that two land-rich widows in the 1970s were carving into five-acre “farmettes,” threading with roads and a drainage system, and planning to sell off as soon as they could clear all permits. The women needed to raise money to pay off debts and estate taxes on the 320 acres they inherited from their husbands, and they figured development of their holdings was their only hope. Preservationists and environmentalists intervened, and a heated battle spread from Whidbey Island to Washington, D.C.

The story is familiar, but the ending has a twist. Rather than toss the prairie to developers or snatch it from the private domain as some sort of park, Congress in 1978 found a way to cut the baby in half by declaring the prairie part of the first “national historical reserve.” Under the terms of this hybrid of public-private ownership and local-federal control, the National Park Service would oversee, but not own very much of, the 17,400 acres of Ebey’s Landing National Historical Reserve, a swatch of central Whidbey Island between the Strait of Juan de Fuca on the west coast and Penn Cove on the east. While local farmers kept title to their fields, the Park Service would buy the development rights on as much land as possible and try to influence how other land would be used. Which is pretty much how it played out with the widows’ farms on the prairie. The Park Service purchased their land and promptly resold it (minus development rights) to a local farming family in exchange for development rights on the bulk of the family’s own nearby holdings. And so a large piece of Ebey’s Landing was guaranteed to stay unchanged.

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