‘Paradise’

Marry Riggs has been swimming in Newman Lake since 1924. That’s the year her parents, William and Katrina Perrow, purchased more than 300 feet and more than 10 acres of waterfront property. “I could hardly wait to get out (to the lake) in the summers. As soon as the roads opened, we were on our way,” said Riggs.

Back then, summers at Newman Lake meant freedom.

And not much has changed.

It’s still the kind of place where a fisherman can walk down the road in the middle of the weekday with a tall can of Budweiser in one hand, and a pole in the other, where little girls can swim the shoreline until their fingers prune.

It’s a place where, just for fun, sprucing up your outhouse is encouraged, if not revered.

It’s a place where some seasonal residents still draw water for cleaning and the like from the lake.

Unlike Liberty Lake, the distant twin to Newman, the Spokane County lake is tucked away from the hustle and bustle of Interstate 90 and the Spokane Valley businesses.

Eerily quiet in the winter months, the lake is frozen in time, waiting for the spring and summer to sprout activity and visitors.

But the uniqueness of the small lake is also what ails it.

While major development has pretty much missed the sleepy shoreline of the lake, old cabins are being replaced by newer, and much larger, year-round homes.

The older structures, some of which still have screened in sleeping porches and are decorated with names like Happy Day and Cabin Sweet Cabin, are becoming fewer and fewer.

“There certainly weren’t the mansions that there are now,” Riggs said.

But even with more year-round residents, Newman is still a place for quiet, unpretentious solitude, she said. Little girls can still find a hideout, just like Riggs did some 80 years ago.

“It’s like a different world here,” Riggs said. “I call it my paradise.”

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Newman Lake is named after William Newman, an English-born U.S. Army private who came to Washington state from New York around 1860.

According to records compiled by the Newman Lake Historical Society, an informal group of residents dedicated to preserving the history of the lake, Newman came to the area as an escort to American surveyors along the American and Canadian boundaries in Eastern Washington.

“I think the first families started coming (to Newman Lake) in 1860,” said Tom Rulffes, a member of the society.

Rulffes, who grew up in Otis Orchards and spent his summer frolicking at the lake, built a year-round home at Newman in 1981. He has had an interest in the history of Newman Lake for about nine years, after another Newman Lake resident showed him some old photographs.

“It’s a place that is so rich in tradition,” Rulffes said. “Many people see no reason to write it down, and I think the younger generation just doesn’t care. But we feel it’s an important part of the community out here.”

At one time, Newman Lake, like Liberty, was a social hotspot, with resorts, hotels and dance halls. In the 1900s, trains used to run from Spokane to Moab, on Trent just east of the state line, where buses and stages took passengers the three miles to the lake.

As late as 1957, there were 10 resorts on the lake, where a person could eat, dance, buy gas or candy.

Slowly, those became a distant memory. The last of the resorts, Hampton’s, closed in 1987. The only place to rent a cabin now is at the Sutton Bay Resort. A small store called Cherokee Landing is still occasionally available for grocery items or bait.

“It’s all private now,” said Rulffes.

The privatization is also what has kept it mostly quiet and peaceful, he said.

As the president of the Newman Lake SCOPE – Sheriff’s Community Oriented Policing Effort – Rulffes said crime rarely happens.

“I’d say probably one or two incidents a month, and mostly petty stuff,” Rulffes said.

In the SCOPE office at Trent Avenue and Starr Road, a map with color-coded stickers displays all the incidents of crime in the last 10 years or so. The various incidents include “stolen signs” and similar complaints reminiscent of a small-town.

“We’re just out of the mainstream out here,” Rulffes said.

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Like that of many Newman Lake residents, Riggs’ property has been passed down from generation to generation.

In recent years, she has been forced to sell pieces of the land, to help pay the costs of being an elderly woman living alone. Her shoreline was cut in half. An old summer kitchen house used by her family in the old days was cut down.

“What do you do when you have to pay the taxes?” Riggs said. Taxes on her property are close to $3,000 a year.

Other pieces of the property have been divided among Riggs’ four daughters.

Three of those daughters sold the land. One daughter, Jeannie Gilman, will receive the last piece of property – the waterfront piece – when Riggs is gone.

“It’s a special place for me,” said Gilman, who now lives in Virginia, but returns often to visit her mother.

Though it is not a huge piece, she said she has considered giving the land to a conservation group, to prevent development, and to do her part to protect the watershed.

“Every lake has a personality, and this one is filled with a group of people who share the beauty, and I think share the responsibility of taking care of it,” Gilman said.

In May, 421 acres at the northeast corner of the lake, including 3,000 feet of shoreline and acres of wetlands, was added to the Spokane County Conservation Futures Program.

The program was designed to ensure that natural areas and open spaces will always be accessible to city and county residents.

The land is open to the public with restrictions to protect the area. Prohibited activities include hunting, rock hounding, plant collecting, driving motorized vehicles and building campfires.

Some residents, seasonal and otherwise, couldn’t be happier to see that a piece of the quiet and unique solitude of Newman stays intact.

“There’s just something about Newman that is really unique,” said Wendy Burley, another longtime Newman Lake property owner.

When her parents sold their waterfront cabin in the 1960s, she and her husband bought another.

Their cabin is one of the old treasures. They still get some water from the lake.

“I’ve never not had a place on the lake,” Burley said. “I can’t imagine life without it.”