||| ORCASIONAL MUSINGS BY STEVE HENIGSON |||
The Orcas Island Golf Course started life as a mustard-growing operation, first homesteaded as farmland in the late 1800s. Then in 1961, the Blake family, originally from Canada, bought the property, finished clearing it, and developed it into the 18-hole challenge that it is today. The development included a street of private, half-to-one-acre lots on the eastern edge of the course. The intention was to sell those properties to the avid golfers who were sure to flock to the Blake family’s brand new Orcasian links.
Bob and Mary Blake first built a sawmill at the northern end of the property, to cut, plane, and finish the wood cut from the uncleared portion of the soon-to-be golf course. The sawmill included a small dwelling, still part of the building today, where the family lived for the first few years. Then, in about 1970, as they opened up what they called the Golf Estates, they put their new family home at the entrance to the development.
On the same lot as the Blakes’ new home, Bob built a workshop using wood cut by his own sawmill. It wasn’t anything like commercial building wood. Instead, it was all finished at full size. Two-by-fours are really two inches by four inches in size, rather than the usual one-and-a-half by three-and-a-half. The workshop was built to last forever.
Bob and Mary’s son, Bob Junior, married and began his own family, so Bob built a new home for them, next door. After a longish while, Bob and Mary retired, moved to the mainland, and left the running of the golf course to Bob Junior and his wife, Doreen. In the late 1980s, Bob and Doreen built a new, larger home for themselves deep in the woods near the northeast corner of the golf course. Both of the Blake houses in the Golf Estates Road development were sold.
Shortly after the turn of the 21st century, Bob Junior and Doreen went through a divorce. Doreen ended up owning the golf course, which she ran on her own for a few more years. Their house in the woods was first rented out, and then sold, and Doreen moved into a large trailer that was parked at the old sawmill. The Blake family had come full-circle.
In 2007, Doreen, too, retired, and, after 46 years in the hands of the Blake family, the golf course was passed off to a consortium of golf-playing Orcasians. That didn’t work out as well as expected, so the golf course was sold again, in 2009, to the Taylor family, who have been doing a wonderful job of maintaining and improving it, ever since.
Besides the full-size lumber from which Bob Senior’s workshop was built, there is another anomaly to be noted in the Blakes’ Golf Estates development. There is a covenant attached to every lot along Golf Estates Road which clearly states that the homes which lot owners will put upon their properties must be stick-built in place, and may never be manufactured elsewhere and trucked in. But Bob and Mary’s home, the first one in the development, is clearly a trucked-in, manufactured building. And so were the earliest six of the other 13 houses along the street.
Rules were meant to be broken, on or alongside the golf course. Just ask anyone who plays golf, especially when one is competing against Colonel Bogey or Mr. Murphy.
