Virginia Cowling's Report at Friends of Miller Bay Annual Meeting, November 12, 2001

I am sure there are some of you who do not know what the Cowling Creek Project is all about,  so I will try to start at the very beginning!

Over 30 years ago, my husband and I had our home in Seattle condemned for University expansion, so we set about looking for a place to spend the rest of our days.  It took nearly 2 years before we found our ideal 14-acre wooded parcel with two pristine year-around streams, one mile from Suquamish center.

We built our home here in 1971 and after getting around Kitsap County for a while, began to realize what a unique and beautiful spot we had found, and felt it needed to be preserved for the community.

We approached the Nature Conservancy to take it and give us life estate. They thought the land was gorgeous but they could not monitor such a small piece and would sell it to buy much larger pieces. This was not what we wanted, so we just put the piece in our will to the Parks Department, who also admired it. They had visited the property and given us an Open Space category.

About 6 years later, Paul Dorn, fisheries biologist for the Tribe, told us we had wonderful water in the streams and the topography was such that a hatchery could be operated by gravity alone.  So they did and developed a most successful operation, gradually getting larger. It was Paul, writing for building permits and grants that began identifying the streams as North and South Cowling Creeks, as they were only numbered before. I find it flattering, but awkward when I appeal for help in conserving the area.

In 1982 my husband died and the Tribe, afraid I would sell the land as it had by then become zoned "Rural Residential and the town water line went right by on Miller Bay frontage, offered to buy the 14 acres.  I sold it to them, bargain sale, retaining life estate, getting a small payment and a big charitable deduction. Their contract takes over the Open Space requirements, which is just what they wanted to protect the stream and wild life corridor.

In the years that I have over looked the hatchery, I have been impressed by its importance to our community. It provides employment for tribal members in the operation and maintenance of the facility - a group with a dismal employment rate. The hatchery produces thousands of returning salmon caught by sport and commercial, tribal and non-tribal fisher folk alike, and provides a great food source for consumers.

It is an educational facility. The grade school children tour through the facility, learning of the salmons' life cycle and the importance of maintaining the watershed, and protecting our habitat - our home.

I also see the hatchery as a mediating force in our somewhat divided community, as it benefits all of us, and not just locally. Eggs from this stream are used in creeks throughout Kitsap County and beyond. When I went to the Great Peninsula Conservancy's first annual meeting, and was taken on a tour of the stream and the watershed that runs inside and out of the Silverdale Mall, I was told it was eggs from Cowling Creek and the run of fish that developed were rehabilitating the stream. Clear Creek had been destroyed with the silt from the clearing for the Mall, and now the returning salmon, digging holes to deposit eggs, were stirring up silt, which was carried away by the current.

Then a woman bought the 18 acres containing a portion of the salmon stream to the south of the hatchery. She intended to put a wild life sanctuary on the property and asked for our help. We supported her, but she changed her mind.  She soon found her project was very costly and put the 18 acres up for sale. Our group (The Friends of Miller Bay) asked her if she would give us time to get the community to buy it.  She agreed. We have sold T-shirts, sponsored the Total Experience Gospel Choir, had rummage sales, a walkathon, wrote grants, held an evening with John Muir, held fund raising events in peoples homes, etc.

What Virginia neglected to mention in her history is the 10 acres she has personally bought and donated to The Great Peninsula Conservancy to enhance the size of the protected area.