News

Behind the Finds | Photos tell story of a family, a house and a neighborhood

In their latest storytelling collaboration, Gig Harbor Now writers Tonya Strickland and Greg Spadoni launched a new series this spring called Behind the Finds on the premise that every picture has a story — and some are just waiting to be rediscovered. We’ve linked all the stories here as the series unfolds:

Part 1 Behind the Finds | Every picture has a story

Part 2 Behind the Finds: Every picture has a story (even if I have to make one up)

Part 3 Behind the Finds | Georg, Brigida and John Wolford

Part 4 Gig Harbor Now and Then | Behind the Finds: Chuck Sharman

Part 5 John and Leta Wolford at 5611 S. Oakes Street in Tacoma (this story)

South Tacoma

Circa 1917 | John Wolford, far right, stands in front of his home at 5611 South Oakes Street in South Tacoma with a group of people including his youngest daughter, Marion, on the far left. If anyone can identify the folks here, please let us know.

When we last left the Wolfords, Kansas newlyweds John and Leta were bound for the West Coast, chasing the promise of steady work with the Northern Pacific Railroad in Tacoma.

Skilled blacksmiths like John were in high demand. The railroad’s industrial era was still going strong after the transportation company’s decision in 1873 to make Tacoma its terminus, or end of the line, for its transcontinental rail line, according to the Washington State Historical Society. The boom continued, especially after the railway’s factory operations moved out of downtown Tacoma in 1890, and into the dusty prairie lands just south of the city. Seeking room to expand,  Northern Pacific transformed that open land into a sprawling industrial campus of various shop buildings where its locomotives were repaired, overhauled, and repainted.

The buildings were clustered and known as the “Railroad Shops,” or the “R.R. Shops” for short. They covered the area now known as South Tacoma Way and 56th Street close to where the Tacoma Mall stands today. The expansion  attracted the construction of new businesses and residential neighborhoods to serve the railway’s growing labor force. During this wave of transformation, hundreds of families just like the Wolfords came to Washington state for Northern Pacific’s livable wages, the South Sound’s mild winters and, for new possibilities. John and Leta made the cross-country move from Kansas with their small children — Don and Guida. Their youngest son, Clyde, had tragically died at age 2 before the move. A fourth child, Marion, was born in October 1907 in Tacoma – the same year the Wolfords arrived. A year later, in 1908, historians say the prairies were annexed into the City of Tacoma and the “South Tacoma” name took root.

5611 S. Oakes Street

5611 South Oakes Street after its second story addition.

The story told by the Wolford’s turn-of-the-century photographs in our Behind the Finds series, show John, Leta, Don, Guida and baby Marion settled into a house at 5611 S. Oakes Street, located about two miles from the railroad shops where John worked. That house still stands today. Here’s a photo of it in the early 1900s.

Property records show the home was built in 1906 on a 7,200-square-foot lot. It had about four bedrooms, no bathrooms and its interior boasted 1,300-square-feet.

Once used by early pioneers for farming and grazing, the South Tacoma neighborhoods the rail workers called home still bore many of its rural charms, even when it was surrounded by industry. The calm of the original settler farms and untouched grasslands is evident from the photos we’ve obtained for our Behind the Finds series. The pictures of South Oakes Street show its prairie origins peeking out from behind low wooden fences, modest houses and the open sky above. In these sepia-toned photos of the past, empty lots and short wood fences separate neighboring houses beyond the Wolford home, each spaced generously apart.

These pictures, for example, taken in the early 1900s, show a South Oakes Street backdrop of untamed grass, its uneven tufts hint at rural environment not yet claimed by pavement or manicured lawns. There are no sidewalks or curbs — but tall poles and wires show there’s the comforts of electricity. Even still, these photos speak to a time before full city infrastructure took over, when horses and foot traffic were more common than cars. The scenes carry the feel of a open space rather than the bustling urban blocks of John’s employer located just two miles away.

2025

Greg Spadoni browses old photographs for sale.

One of the biggest challenges in piecing together a family’s history from a pile of mostly unmarked photos—some more than a century old—is figuring out where the houses were and who they belonged to. Yet hopeful clues remain, like address numbers nailed to a flat porch post. Even without a street name, those numbers can often serve as starting points for online research through U.S. Census records and other resources to help identify the people who lived there.

On a recent afternoon, writer Greg Spadoni and I had cobbled together just enough information on several of the homes pictured in the Wolford collection to justify a trip out to South Tacoma to slueth out the former Wolford home. There, on South Oakes Street, we found the house — and it was still standing.

But, it looks different now: it’s painted yellow today and is tucked behind a collection of ornamental shrubs and potted flowers. Neighboring houses are closer, and a busy urban thoroughfare with bustling car traffic has overtaken the former prairie grasslands of its origins. But the home still spoke a quiet language of its past. Flowers bloomed around every corner, and its current owners told us they salvaged bricks from its original indoor fireplace to line the backyard garden beds.

Here’s what 5611 South Oakes Street looks like today, pictured alongside to an early 1900s printed photo of the same house that I’m holding up for comparison:

South Oakes Street in 2025 compared to early 1900s photo of the same house.

Julie Preston and Anthony Hunter have called the Wolfords’ former house a home for many years, tending to the garden and restoring original details where they could. When the Wolfords first moved into the house, the couple told us that John planted a Douglas fir in the side yard — and a pear tree. Julie and Anthony, raising kids of their own in the house, eventually removed the fir for safety but left the 100-year-old pear tree for the sentiment. Today, that same pear tree looks quite old with its twisted limbs covered in lichen, but it still stands tall.

From left, writer Greg Spadoni and Anthony check out how the house changed over the years using an old photo from the Wolford collection.

Elsewhere in the yard, Julie and Anthony told us that in the early years, an outhouse was tucked into the backyard as the home’s only toilet since it was built before many neighborhood infrastructure features like sewer lines. The outhouse was later removed to make way for the neighborhood’s new back alleyway (and when the modern joys of indoor plumbing arrived). When that occurred, the home’s restrooms were clearly added to the main house, but they exist today in a spot that was essentially the back porch area and were walled in years after construction of the main rooms.

Marion and the chicken photo

Julie told me that John and Leta’s youngest daughter, Marion, visited the home as a much older woman before she died in 1990 at age 83. She just walked up to the front of the house one day, Julie told us. Marion told them that when she was a child, her family kept a whopping 100 chickens in the backyard. She also told them about the pear tree, the fir, and was curious whether Julie kept two of the house’s glass paneled interior doors. “I had restored them, and she was happy to hear,” Julie added.

As it so happens, one of the photos, undated and lacking a caption, show a young Marion in a high-collared shirt and dress holding a hen in her arms, in what very much looks like the backyard to the South Oakes Street house. There’s a wooden coop complete with chicken wire and a feed bowl below her:

A young Marion Wolford holds a chicken on the South Oakes Street property.

Another surprise about the house is it began as a one-story structure with a front-facing entry door and porch. Greg and I suspected as much, given the “5611” displayed on it – but we weren’t sure. As it turns out, Julie confirmed that the Wolfords added a second story and dormer window. In historic photos, you can see this evolution: the steep roofline and exposed rafters suggest a Craftsman-style bungalow, a popular architectural trend in the early 20th century, designed with hand-crafted touches and practical charm.

The dormer addition allowed for more headroom upstairs, likely transforming attic storage into usable living space for his growing family. The siding changed, too, going from wood planks to shingles and back again in the present day. The Wolfords switched the porch around by moving the front door and porch to a side-entry setup. They also added more front steps off the porch. Julie and Anthony told us the original porch window is still there, just in a new spot.

In the undated photo of the South Oakes Street house as a one story building in its earliest years, we see its style before the structural changes. A man who looks a lot like John Wolford, though it’s hard to tell from the side, is sitting on the grass out front. Two wooden rocking chairs can be seen on the old front porch, which was facing straight out at the front of the house. Its style of the porch is outfitted with simple wooden side rails, carved posts and a hanging flower basket. The house number, 5611, is proudly displayed at the face of what the internet tells me is a partial-width, flat-roofed front porch with classically inspired columns and side railing.

The porch poses

The addition of more porch steps is interesting to note since the Wolfords took a whole photoshoot on the new front steps — one photo for each of them. It was there we noticed a theme — all the Wolfords posed there between two large planters. Affectionately known to us here at Behind the Finds as “the porch house” and “the porch poses,” those clues in the porch photos helped us piece together the puzzle of which houses belong to who in the photos, and where those houses were or remain located today.

Julie and her husband say the home has a layered history of family life. Julie recalled peeling back “14 layers of wallpaper” in the dining and front rooms over the years as she restored the home. She even saved fragments of the original horsehair plaster used in the walls from when the home was built in 1906 It was, and somehow still is, a place shaped by industry, family, and the determination of those who lived there.

Check back soon to learn the rest of this family’s story in our new series, Behind the Finds.