Pine Lake Park

Pine Lake, out east of Seattle on the Sammamish Plateau, stayed rural until the 1970s, and between the 1910s and the 1960s a small resort sat on its eastern shore [1]. Around 1917 somebody whose name nobody recorded built five small cabins there, and the place hardly grew through the twenties, mostly because the roads were few and dirt [1]. Reiff French bought the eighteen-acre resort in 1932 and called it French's LaPine, though everyone said Pine Lake Resort [1]. Water was the joke of it: four deep wells already on the site, and French added two more, one of them dressed up as a wishing well [1]. Once the Depression eased and the roads improved, he built fifteen cabins, sixteen counting his own, under the Douglas firs, three of them down on the eastern shore [1]. He kept a log grocery with a popcorn machine and antlers over the door, and a dance hall with a nickelodeon [1]. Mick Macko took over the leasing in 1957, and on a busy weekend as many as four thousand people came [1]. King County bought it, and the last season came around 1966 [1].