Originally published in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, June 18, 1978
By Joan Mann
Venerable 73-year-old farmhouse with ten bedrooms is the home of Pat Brunton. It also is a Maple Valley institution. When she and her husband, the late Frederic K. Brunton, purchased the house with its surrounding 67 acres, they did not realize they also were getting a chapter in the history of the valley.
The house was built in 1905 by railroad contractor Olaf Olson, who built the narrow-gauge railway to the Monte Cristo mines and the tunnels through Rogers Pass for Canadian Pacific trains and constructed a tunnel through the Cascades for the Milwaukee Railroad. The walls of the house are solid concrete, a material familiar to Olson, all of it mixed by hand and poured by laborers who lived in tents on the site during construction.
(Two years later, Olson applied his tunnel-building skills to a new barn. Supporting arches of the interior, which literally is tunnel-shaped, are fashioned with short inch-thick boards bolted together in the technology of that period.)
The house 2,200 has sq. ft. on each floor, a parlor, dining room, two studies, a huge kitchen with butler’s pantry and ten bedrooms plus huge hallways on each floor. All of its 67 windows have a view of meadow and orchard or the misty Cascade foothills.
“I really feel owning this house carries with it a special obligation,” says Pat Brunton.
“Many old-timers in the area have a deep interest in historic preservation and so have I.”
But, besides restoring the farmhouse to its original condition, the family has made it available to community groups. Most recently 185 guests filled every room during a Valley Opera Guild benefit for the Seattle Opera. A small chamber music ensemble entertained at one end of the commodious second-floor hallways.
One of the traditions of the old house easily has been maintained by Pat Brunton, who is beloved by friend and neighbor for, among other reasons, her gifts of home-baked bread. She uses the original Malleable wood range which has turned out thousands of loaves during its history. A large brick barbecue oven stands between the Malleable and an electric range. The kitchen is large enough to feed an entire crew of farm-hands, and an iron triangle hangs out on the back porch, ready to signal them to supper.
Because Pat Brunton has an extensive background in antique furnishings (her family owns the Bushell auction house) she was able to locate many mahogany pieces of the right period. Large Oriental carpets are used extensively as floor coverings; many are in the rich dark rose, purple and mauve colors evocative of turn-of-the century decor. A rose-color flocked wallpaper in a decades-old pattern was ordered from England for the dining room.
“It was terrible to put up,” says Mrs. Brunton, who did all the interior painting and papering.
“You would just lift a section to the wall and it would fall apart—right down the middle!”
The living room furniture is overstuffed and oversized—all in keeping with the period of the house. The piano is a rosewood square grand, circa 1880, with an elaborate scrolled music stand.
The exceptionally wide upstairs hallway is a gallery of framed family memorabilia and the works of Northwest artists purchased by Pat Brunton. A buffalo rug in the hall heads into the master bedroom, which is dominated by an immense sleigh bed.
“That kind of curving furniture was developed when the band saw was motorized,” explains Mrs. Brunton.
“And it is so heavy; it took four men to carry that bed upstairs.”
The upper floor windows offer views of the rolling meadows where clover and timothy grow to make hay for the 35 head of Black Angus cattle on the Brunton farm. There are a couple of horses for visiting children to ride, lots of chickens along with a peacock or two and some guinea hens. Eaves on the back of the house and the barn are lined with the nests of hundreds of barn swallows.
In 1976, young David Brunton researched the history of his family’s pioneer residence for a high school project. He wrote:
“The Olson mansion has now become Brunton’s farm, more of a ‘hobby farm’ than ‘the bread and butter farm’ it used to be.”
Still, the splendid old house always will be the matriarch of Maple Valley mansions.
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