THEN & NOW: The Long and Rich History of Today's Juanita Bay Park

Longtimers remember well the former incarnation of Kirkland’s fabulous, 144-acre Juanita Bay Park, today rich not only in wildlife, but also in the city’s fascinating history.

From 1932 to 1975 the park that today is one of Lake Washington’s most important wetlands -- home to a myriad of waterfowl and even winter habitat for trumpeter swans -- was the nine-hole Juanita Golf Course.

Legendary American pro Joanne Gunderson Carner -- “Big Mama” as she came to be known -- grew up nearby and learned to golf on the Juanita links. It’s incredible when you think of it -- this is a golfer, a Kirkland native, who won two U.S. Women's Open and five U.S. Women's Amateur titles, earned 43 wins on the LPGA Tour and three LPGA Player of the Year Awards.

There are several Kirkland area natives who learned on the course that still work in the industry today. The one I remember is Ron Hass, a Lake Washington High class of 1972 grad who now owns Avalon Golf Links in Skagit County.

But the history of this green patch of Kirkland long precedes the golf course. From time immemorial until sometime in the early 1800s, the mouth of nearby Juanita Creek was a permanent village site of the Duwamish people, the TAHB-Tah-Byook band. Before they vanished from the scourge of smallpox introduced mostly likely by sea-going Spanish explorers, these people made their living by hunting the surrounding forests for deer and bear and the wetlands for waterfowl, catching salmon and trout in the lake and streams, gathering native berries like salmonberry and salal and, importantly, pulling starchy wapato bulbs from the shallows of the bay that are now the park. Sadly, almost nothing is known about the actual people of this band.

A few my friends growing up in the '60s scoured the borders of the golf course looking for golf balls they could sell, and as the story goes, some of them mowed the fairways and picked up litter around the course and parking lot to earn free golf time on the links.

The course was built by one Guy Farrar, a real estate developer who looms large in Kirkland history, and apparently bought the land with money he made during the Alaska Gold Rush.

At any rate, the old photos here from the Kirkland Heritage Society will no doubt rekindle many memories for longtime Kirkland and Juanita residents. And for those who came later and now visit the exquisite park, they'll provide some sense of who and what came before.