The aftermath: With his health failing, Sohrweide had to sell his land

Chapter 5, The Old Goat Man of Rosedale

Having a pension allowed Sohrweide to experience his later life on his own terms, but this freedom came to an end when he became bedridden in 1962, not long after he had moved into his new cabin built with Spadoni lumber and labor. It is probably around this time that Greg remembers visiting Sohrweide with my grandfather, John Wagoner. When his illness continued, the 87-year-old recluse had to check into a Tacoma hospital for medical care, and he was later transferred to a nursing home. It is probable, though not certain, that Grampy was the one who took Sohrweide to the hospital.

In May of 1962, Wagoner died of a heart attack, depriving Sohrweide of his good friend and benefactor. We occasionally received reports on his health from Borghild Anderson, who may have been the only Rosedale neighbor who visited him in the final seven years of his life. He passed away at age 93 on March 7, 1969, and is buried in the Rosedale Cemetery.

Dorothy Sohrweide Oliver

His daughter Dorothy made several trips to Washington to visit and deal with the financial realities of her father’s need for medical care in his final years. Dorothy passed away childless in 1997, and her brother Leroy died in 1972. In 2020, I was able to contact Richard Sohrweide, Leroy’s son. Richard had never met his grandfather and knew little about him.

“I heard he was a cranky old cuss,” he said. “I don’t know what the situation was with the family, but I know there were some pretty bad feelings. I don’t know much about the family history, having left home at 17 to join the Navy, which I retired from in 1970. Dad never told me anything about my grandfather. What little that I do know I got from my grandmother and my aunt Dorothy.

Richard Sohrweide

“I can remember when he was ailing and about to die. Dorothy was taking care of him when he was getting pretty bad. To the best of my knowledge, we never got any mail from him, and he never visited my dad and my dad never visited him. About all I know about the man is that he had some property in Gig Harbor and he had some goats.”

To pay for her father’s medical care, Dorothy turned to the Rosedale community for help to find a supposed cache of money that Raynard had left on the property. It was either in a jar buried beside a maple tree or in a bag in the crotch of the tree—our memories of the details differ—but many of us remember a neighborhood search party looking for the right tree and the money. Whether the cash was a fabrication of the failing mind of an old man or it was true, the money never materialized.

In later years, Roy Spadoni’s daughter Annette and her husband Frank Bannon built a home and large garage about where Sohrweide’s shack had been.  “I never met Mr. Sohrweide,” Annette said, “but we were told that when we turned over dirt, to look for his jar of money.” In the process of building and gardening, she added: “We’ve turned over pretty much every bit of dirt on this land and didn’t find it.”

Dorothy and her husband
Alma VanFleet

With only Sohrweide’s presumably modest union pension available to cover medical expenses, Dorothy had to put his property on the market. It was purchased by a group that consisted of the four Spadoni brothers and their three sisters, along with all their spouses, who formed a partnership called Shorecrest. They moved Ray Nash Drive inland about 100 feet to create a row of waterfront lots, and they installed a community septic system with a drainfield in the northeast corner. They also logged and cleared the land and installed some gravel roads.

At that point, the development stalled for need of additional financing. Some of the investors wanted to continue, and some wanted to cash out their investment. A decision was made to sell, but as part of the division of the proceeds, three families took lots on the hillside overlooking Ray Nash Drive. Roy took the northern lot, now occupied by Frank and Annette.  Nelda Spadoni Langhelm and her husband Jim Langhelm Sr. took the middle lot, though Nelda passed away in 1968. Jim and his second wife, Helga Jensen, built a home there in the early 1970s and lived there until their deaths. It is currently owned by Linda Spadoni. Lola took the lot closest to Roland and Marjorie, putting the title in the name of her granddaughter Angela, who eventually put it on the market, and I bought it in 2002. We cleared it about five years later, but it is still vacant, except for a used concrete and metal pergola we installed there around 2010 and a small solarium with plastic windows.

The remainder of the property changed hands several times before finally being subdivided into large lots and turned into a high-end development called Ray Nash Estates.

This recent image from Zillow.com shows the lot lines of the southwest corner of what used to be Sohrweide's property. The red S shows the approximate location of his former home. The land was cleared by the Shorecrest partnership in the mid-1960s. During Sohrweide's occupation, Ray Nash Drive ran along the water, but it was moved to make way for waterfront lots.

When the property went into Spadoni hands in June of 1962, the neighborhood kids had free reign to explore. I was about 10 at the time, and Steve, Greg and I spent quite a bit of time there—though our memories are now pretty foggy. One incident we all remember quite vividly is when we almost fell into Sohrweide’s open well shaft—and were saved by Steve’s intuition and experience.

“You and I and Greg were walking around out there,” Steve said. “We were probably looking for the lost bag of money. We looked at a lot of the fruit trees and ate off some of them. There was a lot of brown, dry grass, fairly tall, and we were just walking through that. And we just saw something on the ground, and the first thing I thought was that it was a five-gallon bucket that had tar in it. It was just black. I remember picking up a rock and tossing it in there, and . . . it wasn’t a bucket, the rock went down a ways, and then we heard a clunk or splash. Based on my recollection of how long it took the rock to go down, I’d say it was about 20 feet deep. Greg has since looked up the records of wells, and I think he said it was 21 feet. If we would have just plowed ahead, all three of us would have been at the bottom of that well. I was just smart enough to know it didn’t look right. We might have made the newspapers, who knows, three kids with broken legs at the bottom of a well, found days later. Nobody would have heard us holler.”

Greg remembers a lot of junk being scattered around the tarpaper shack that Sohrweide lived in, but Steve was lucky enough to stumble across a beautiful painted duck decoy, and he also ended up with a postcard, though like the decoy, the card is long lost. “I remember it kicked around the house for years,” Greg said. “It had a doctored photo of a watermelon sitting on a railroad flatcar, taking up the whole thing.  The card was filled out and sent, either by him or to him, but I don’t remember what it said.”

We also remember that Sohrweide had made trails through the woods, lining their borders with stones, and on the north side near Rosedale Street, there was a large concrete reservoir, about 10 feet wide, 20 feet long and 6-8 feet deep, which was dry when we came upon it.

Greg seems to have the best recollection, and also some speculation about its history: “It had a wooden building on top of it with a shake roof, I suppose. When I was talking to Dick Meyer in 2005, he told me that was not Sohrweide’s but rather belonged to some people who lived on the water and had the tennis court next to the road just past Eide’s store. That was their source of water, and it ran through the steel pipe that we could still see when we were kids at the tip of the lagoon, part of it lying on the mud when the tide was out. Considering Sohrweide’s distrust of almost everybody, he seems unlikely to have allowed it to be built on his property, so it probably predated him. There were four owners of the property in the 1920s alone, before Sohrweide, and the reservoir could have been built during any of those ownerships. I don’t think any of those previous four lived on the property.”

Jim Langhelm recalls the sound of a ram pump that he could see and hear in operation from his property, and in combination with springs on the property, it likely was used to fill the reservoir. A ram pump uses hydraulic pressure to move water uphill, with no other source of power needed.

“That pump system was in the wetlands across Rosedale Street from the Meyer Farm driveway,” Jim said. “I can still recall in my mind the distinct sound of the ram pump, because we could hear it from our place, and it was in constant operation.  Just like I can still recall the distinct metallic sounds of the milk cans being picked up at R.B. Meyer’s milk stand beside the road across from where the ram pump was. The full cans were picked up on a daily basis from that stand and replaced with empty ones, the ones that were making the noise.

“The water pickup system consisted of several 55-gallon wood barrels connected in line together by lengths of what looked like wood gutters. That wetland is a flat area extending back to the base of the rise of ground that the Ray Nash Estates are now built on. There are numerous springs that come out at the point where the flat wetlands go up against the ground sloping down to it. A wooden gutter picked up water from one of the springs and conveyed it to the first barrel. The next barrel was a gutter’s length from the first and received its water from the overflowing first barrel. The gutters and barrels were sequenced in this manner until the gravity flow of water was about 40 feet from the edge of Rosedale Street. The barrels apparently were used as sediment traps that resulted in the last barrel dispensing clear water. The water coming out of the last barrel was then piped into the water powered ram pump, which ran continuously. The water coming out of the pump went underground from there and I had no idea where it went.”

Most likely, the water went into the reservoir and from there continued to serve one or more homes in Rosedale in an agreement that had been reached before Sohrweide bought the property. Whether he received any income from the deal is not known, but it seems doubtful.

“When we first moved to Rosedale,” Jim continued, “and for many years to follow, there was a three-quarter-inch or one-inch metal pipe that could be seen crossing the head end of the lagoon. It came out of the ground from the eastern edge of the beach along the grassy point in front of our house, went under the seabed across the head of the lagoon and then showed itself again as it went up the west side of the beach and underground from there towards Eide’s store. I had been told that it provided water to people by the name of Pike, who lived across from the Rosedale Hall.”

The reservoir was destroyed when the land was cleared in the 1960s, and my dad salvaged the bulb-shaped cast-iron ram pump. It sat outside his barn for many years, eventually either rusting away or being hauled off as junk or scrap metal.

Continue to Chapter 6