Courtesy photo
The cozy 115-year-old Dutch colonial on Cottage Lake is the second oldest house in Woodinville and continues to weather the years with grace and strength (as it looks today).

Time slows down at the second oldest house in Woodinville

In 1891 women liberated their wardrobes from the once-fashionable “bustle.” Charles and Frank Duryea collaborated to begin building an engine-powered “horseless carriage.” And President Benjamin Harrison traveled to Washington state where 42,837 Seattle well-wishers stood in the rain to greet him.

That same year Ezra Jurey began building a charming two-story home on the south end of Cottage Lake. He had purchased the home’s design plans from a magazine ad. Using giant fir beams, he constructed his lakeside Dutch colonial. It featured a gambrel roof, a barn-like style of roof derived from roofs found on 17th century Dutch and English homes. He also installed two eight-foot dormers for light and ventilation. And for a fancy finish, he added a Victorian gingerbread trim around the perimeter of the eves.

“I think Ezra wanted to dress up the house,” says Mary McCain who has owned the historic house with her husband, Matt, since 2001. She continues, “Ezra’s parents, Sarah and John S. Jurey Sr. lived with him — and it’s just my guess — but I think he added a Victorian accent for his mom. The shingles hang from the eves like icicles. It’s really unique. And the columns on the front porch are also covered with shingles. I think he added those features for his mom, too. Sometimes I have this image of Ezra, about 25 or 26, building this house with his parents hanging around and giving their two cents.”

Today, the cozy Dutch colonial is the second oldest house in Woodinville and continues to weather the years with grace and strength. Only a pioneer cabin beats it in age.

Mary says that local residents occasionally refer to the home as the “Judge Jurey” house. But Superior Court Judge John Slaughter Jurey Jr. never lived in the house, though he visited Ezra frequently.

On one of his visits to Ezra’s house, Judge Jurey remarked, “This has been a perfect day.” Moments later, he suffered a fatal heart attack.

This story of Judge Jurey, and many other stories related to their home’s history, interests the McCains. It gives them a connection to Ezra’s home. But even more, the couple has a personal connection as well. Matt spent his childhood in the house from 1975 when he was four until he graduated from high school.

“This house is such a special place because my husband grew up here,” Mary explains, adding, “We’re the sixth owners of the house. My in-laws owned the house before us.”

Matt and Mary say they feel such a strong connection to their home they have decided to restore it. “We re-located the door on the north side to its original place. And we had fir siding made to match the original ship lap siding as bevels and widths are not the same as you can get today. The house leaves a lot of clues as to what materials are appropriate. It has all the original moldings and I think Ezra handmade them. We’ve tried to get stain to match the dark chocolate molding and we still have all the old hinges and doorknobs on the doors. The windows are original too. They have wavy glass and it’s just beautiful when the sun comes through the windows and we see the patterns, imperfections and bubbles in the glass.”

Although some aspects of the home continue to age, other aspects have held up rather well over the past 115 years.

Take Ezra’s cast iron and nickel-plated cook stove, still standing in the kitchen in the same spot since 1891.

It alone has a story to tell — from the early 1890s when Sarah Jurey kept a constant eye on it, feeding it wood and adjusting its dampers and flues, to the 1930s when Mary Elizabeth Slaughter, a distant relation who inherited the house from Ezra, used the stove to fry up a plate of bull frogs, among other delicacies, to the 1970s when Matt’s mom cooked a turkey in it. “We don’t use it now,” says Mary, “But it has a place of honor in the kitchen.”

She mentions another historic landmark that holds a place of honor — the outhouse. It currently serves as an attractive garden element and has a story to tell also.

“It’s not functional,” Mary notes. “But we wanted to save it because it’s a neat part of the house’s history. It dates back to the 1930s and I remember Joe Wilwerding (grandson of former resident Mary Elizabeth Slaughter) telling me he had to walk his sisters to the outhouse at night and wait for them. I think it’s crazy that the house didn’t have indoor plumbing until 1970.”

Much of Mary’s historic information comes from her conversations with the former residents of her home or their relatives. She also gleaned background information from Woodinville resident Susie Egan who is researching Cottage Lake history for the Friends of Cottage Lake and Woodinville Heritage Society.

In a joint undertaking, Susie and Mary contacted Joe Wilwerding at his residence in Texas.

In phone conversations, Joe told them he visited the Jurey House often as a child during the depression era when his maternal grandmother, Mary Elizabeth Slaughter, lived there.

Joe grew up on Capital Hill in Seattle and spent his summers and weekends at his grandmother’s house on Cottage Lake and gladly recounted many of his memories. He recalled happy times swimming, fishing, harvesting blackberries and catching bull frogs.

Mary says, “I was just fascinated hearing about Joe’s childhood in the 1930s and realizing it was very similar to my husband’s. All the adventures they both had here at the lake and at different times — being boys — making forts and enjoying the outdoors.”

Matt McCain says his most memorable childhood moment in the Jurey house involves a ghostly prank.

“One memory that cracks me up is that we had these old portraits of the Jurey family, some of Ezra and a few of the others. My sister and I told our friends and our babysitter they were the ghosts that haunted the house just to freak them out. My friends got spooked and didn’t want to come over after that. And our babysitter never returned. That was our biggest victory.”

Asked what he loved most about the house as a boy, Matt replies, “The attic. My parents converted it to a room when I was 11 and it became my little palace. It had a skylight and I could listen to the rain.”

He adds, “I’m big on nostalgia and I have this sense that if I can keep things as they were, I can slow down time just a little bit.”