Buckner Homestead

Stehekin, the people of the Lake Chelan country said, means the way through: the pass at the head of the lake led over to the Skagit. In 1889 a settler named William Buzzard took up a claim on a horseshoe bend of the Stehekin River, a few miles above the head of the lake, built a log cabin and cleared a garden. In 1910 he sold it to William Van Buckner and his wife May, Californians drawn by Van's brother, who had come up years before for the mining, and the next spring the family moved in.

The Buckners dug an irrigation ditch from Rainbow Creek and began planting apples in 1912. By 1925 the orchard covered nearly fifty acres, and every fall the family and their neighbors picked, sorted and packed the crop to ship down the lake by boat. For years the Buckners wintered in California, until their son Harry stayed through the snow in 1915, the first of the family to live in the valley year-round. Their house was the place valley people stopped in, summer or winter.

Harry and his wife sold the homestead, buildings and orchard to the National Park Service in 1970, after it had become part of Lake Chelan National Recreation Area. The Park Service keeps it as the only intact homestead in the North Cascades park complex: the cabin, barn, packing shed and outbuildings, about a dozen acres of orchard with some of the original trees still bearing, and the old ditch from Rainbow Creek, which still waters them.