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The prohibition movement of 1916 promised Mukilteo a booming business, rum-running, and Smugglers Gulch was the center of the operation. Now a popular restaurant, Charles at Smugglers Cove, the home once held the likes of people named "Charlie the Pup" and "Short Card Johnson." and perhaps the most well known local rum-runner was Seattle Police Lieutenant Roy Olmstead. Olmstead was caught in what was called the largest shipment of liquor ever seized in the North West, just south of Mukilteo.
Agents scrambled for boats to patrol the waters of Mukilteo to catch bootleggers and rum-runners who shipped the illegal liquor from the Sound onto local beaches at night. The bays and coves of Puget Sound that opened up into Canadian waters were perfect for the operation, so was the huge house at 8310 53rd Avenue West. Sitting high above the cove, the home built in 1931 provided an unlikely backdrop for the lucrative business.
The owner, rum-runner C.P. Richards, never finished the house, living there with only sub-floors and framing. Richard did, however, install a second basement under the original concrete basemen in the two-story home. A large, fake furnace was the entrance to the nine by nine foot sub-basement which held the still, and a tunnel connected the operation to the Gulch incase the smugglers needed to make a quick get away. Rum-runners shipped mash from Canada, probably to McConnell's Boathouse, said Snohomish County Senior Planner for Historic Preservation, Louise Lindgren.
The sub-basement was cemented in around 1945 by Axel Jensen, who purchased the home for his family. Jensen's daughters remember their father giving them old whiskey bottles adorned in gold he had found in the basement. Jensen finished the home and lived there with his wife and three daughters until he sold the home in the early 1950s for $18,000. Jensen's daughter, Diana Barstad said her father feared the steep cliff supporting the home would collapse in the heavy rains. Barstad said leaving the home was difficult, especially for the girls' mother who loved the kitchen looking out over Smuggler's Gulch, Possession Sound and the Olympic Mountain Range.
The Jensen girls played in a yard where the outline of the tunnel was evidenced by the sinking in of the soft ground it had been built under. Even today, rumors of hidden passageways and hollow columns serving as lookouts still circulate among the curious. The women said they remember the home as the happiest time of their childhood, but some things about the home spooked its inhabitants. "I've sometimes thought it could be haunted," Barstad said. Barstad said she remembered a bullet hole in the den, where legend says a man was killed. "I would come home from school and I would be scared to be alone here," she said. The Jensen Girls did not spend much time worrying about the past, the lived in the present and looked to te future. "My dream was always to get married here and alk down those steps," said Jensen's youngest daughter Yvonne Crow. "I don't think I realeized I lived in a really special house," Barstad said.
-by Cynthia Nunley
Mukilteo Beacon
