The first image is a photograph taken some time in the late 1930s or early ‘40s of my great-great-grandfather, Marion Crider, and his second child, my great-grandaunt, 𝗦𝗮𝗱𝗶𝗲, standing in front of what appears to be a storefront on Main Street in downtown Sumner. Sadie moved from Eagle Bend, Minnesota to Sumner, Washington in 1905, at the age of twenty. She wed longtime bachelor John Ezra Kelley on November 20, 1907. The second image is a portrait of John. He was 36 years old when he married the “pretty, young Sadie Crider” who was fourteen years his junior. She received the Kelley Farm house as a wedding gift from John in 1907. Records from 1910 and 1920 show they owned large sections of land around Rhodes Lake.

John was the third child born to William and Mary Kelley, but he assumed the duties and responsibilities of the eldest when both his older siblings died at an early age. His family was among the first settlers to establish homesteads out of the wilderness between the Puyallup Valley and the Cascade foothills. William and Mary traveled by wagon train from their home in Illinois to the banks of Fennel Creek. The arduous journey by ox-drawn wagon took seven months. They departed on March 28, 1864 with six wagons and reached Washington Territory the following November. The third image is a portrait of William Barton Kelley and the fourth image is a portrait of his wife, Mary Melvina (Williams) Kelley.

After arriving in the Puyallup Valley, the Kelleys spent the first winter on the farm of John Van Ogle. By the spring, William had purchased two hundred acres of land, and started building a road to his homestead and a log cabin. He completed the cabin for his family in the spring of 1865 and welcomed the birth of their first child on January 16, 1866. As money and supplies were running low at the end of the first year, William worked as a school teacher in the summer and labored in logging camps during the winter. In 1867, he returned to his homestead and resumed the task of clearing the land for the farm. Eventually, the Kelleys cleared enough wilderness for the family farm, located along the old Naches Indian Trail which would later become the Old Sumner Buckley Highway. Kelley Creek supplied the farm with plenty of fresh water from the Cascade Mountains.

The Kelley Farm is situated on one of the earliest land claims in eastern Pierce County. In 1853, Reuben Ashford Finnell received a land grant of one hundred sixty acres in what is now Bonney Lake, Washington. He built a cabin and barn near the creek that bears his name and started growing crops on the prairie. Later that same year, members of the first wagon train crossed over the mountains through the Naches Pass. In some places, it was necessary to lower the wagons over a cliff. Isaac Lemon and Addison Perham signed for land claims on September 20, 1853. William Moore Kincaid, John Van Ogle, Isaac Woolery, and others were among those who settled in the area that would become Sumner.

By July 1856, Finnell had abandoned his claim and returned to his home state of Virginia after his cabin and barn were burned during the Puget Sound Indian War. Eight years later, Kelley acquired the former Finnell claim and an additional 40 acres. The fifth image is a photo taken in June 1976 of Sadie holding the rifle that belonged to her father-in-law, William Barton Kelley, one of Washington state’s earliest pioneers and a resident of the Puyallup Valley for over 55 years.