Lee Pickett, Photographer of the Skykomish Valley

Lee Pickett spent much of his photographic career in one of the most dramatic corners of Washington State. From his home and studio in Index, he photographed the towns, railroads, logging operations, mountain roads, workers, recreation, and everyday life of the Skykomish Valley and Stevens Pass corridor during the first decades of the 20th century.

His surviving work is particularly strong because Pickett was interested in more than scenery. He photographed the infrastructure and people reshaping the Cascades: railroad crews boring through mountains, loggers working beneath enormous spar trees, early automobiles negotiating primitive roads, quarry workers cutting granite, schoolchildren, sports teams, businesses, hotels, and families.

For postcard collectors, these images provide a remarkably detailed record of communities such as Index, Gold Bar, Sultan, Startup, Skykomish, Scenic, and Leavenworth during a period of rapid change.

From Michigan to Washington

Lee Pickett was born in Big Rapids, Michigan, in 1882. He attended public school there and worked for a time as a bookkeeper.

In 1898, Pickett traveled west with his grandfather. They stopped briefly in Snohomish County before continuing north to Nome, Alaska, where they spent a season during the early years of the northern gold rushes.

Pickett eventually returned to Michigan, completed his education, and learned photography. He later moved back to Washington and opened a photography studio in Seattle.

After roughly three years in business, Pickett embarked on an extended photographic journey. He traveled south along the West Coast through California and New Mexico before continuing east through Chicago, Montreal, and Nova Scotia. University of Washington biographical records indicate that he produced scenic photography for both the Grand Trunk and Canadian Pacific railways during this period.

Pickett returned to Seattle in 1909 and moved to the small mountain community of Index the following year.

It would become the center of his photographic life.

Photographing Index and the Skykomish Valley

Index sits beneath the granite walls and peaks of the western Cascades along the Great Northern Railway route through Stevens Pass.

When Pickett arrived, the surrounding region was being transformed by logging, mining, quarrying, railroad expansion, and road construction. His camera became an unusually thorough witness to that transformation.

Pickett photographed the streets and houses of Index alongside the businesses and industries that supported the town. His archive includes the Index Granite Works, Western Granite Quarry, Index-Galena Lumber Company, Heybrook Lumber Company, hotels, telephone offices, schools, construction camps, and community gatherings.

He traveled throughout the Skykomish Valley photographing nearby towns such as Sultan, Startup, Gold Bar, Baring, and Skykomish. His photographs often include captions written into the negative with a location, subject, catalog number, and some variation of the Pickett name.

One of the most interesting aspects of Pickett's work is how frequently he photographed apparently ordinary events.

A school basketball team, a Halloween party, a telephone office, a picnic, or a group of workers standing beside a machine may not have seemed historically important when the photograph was made. A century later, these images can provide some of the best surviving records of the people and institutions that made up these small communities.

Roads into the Cascades

Pickett also documented the arrival of the automobile in places where roads barely existed.

The first road between Index and Galena was built in 1912. Pickett photographed a Flanders 20 automobile navigating the muddy new route, preserving an early moment in the transition from railroad-dependent mountain communities to communities increasingly connected by road.

His later work records the development of the Stevens Pass highway and the roadside infrastructure that followed it.

These images can be particularly interesting to postcard collectors because the nominal subject is not always the most important detail. A card captioned with a mountain or highway may also contain an early filling station, road sign, bridge, automobile, hotel, or business that creates an entirely separate collecting interest.

Pickett was himself an avid mountain climber, which also gave him access to viewpoints and subjects that ordinary commercial photographers rarely reached. His catalog contains mountain landscapes around Index, Baring, Scenic, and the upper Skykomish Valley alongside photographs of climbing parties, hikers, skiers, and other outdoor recreation.

The Great Northern Railway

Pickett's most important professional assignment came from the Great Northern Railway.

During the 1920s, he became the railroad's exclusive photographer for work in the Cascades. The assignment placed him at the center of one of the largest engineering projects in the Pacific Northwest.

The Great Northern was rebuilding its route across Stevens Pass. The project involved reducing grades, electrifying portions of the line, modifying or eliminating troublesome snowsheds, and constructing a new tunnel beneath the Cascade Mountains.

The centerpiece was the new Cascade Tunnel, running approximately 7.8 miles between Berne on the east and Scenic on the west. When it opened on January 12, 1929, it was the longest railroad tunnel in the Western Hemisphere.

Pickett photographed virtually every aspect of its construction.

His images show excavation crews, drilling equipment, electric hoists, pumps, concrete forms, work trains, explosives, engineers, construction camps, locomotives, and the enormous underground spaces created as crews worked toward one another from opposite sides of the mountain.

Many of the photographs are more intimate than ordinary corporate progress pictures. Workers look directly into Pickett's camera while standing beside machinery or deep inside the unfinished tunnel. Other photographs document the technology and working conditions in enough detail to make them valuable records of early 20th-century construction.

According to Pickett's wife Dorothy, his relationship with the railroad became so trusted that he was the only person other than the Great Northern's president who could order a train stopped wherever he needed it for a photograph.

Whether taken literally or as family lore, the story captures the access Pickett enjoyed.

The opening of the Cascade Tunnel

Pickett was present when the new tunnel entered service in January 1929.

His photographs record railroad officials gathered at the portals, construction workers completing the final work, the first trains entering the tunnel, and Great Northern's Oriental Limited beginning service through the new route.

The completed tunnel fundamentally changed railroad operations through the Cascades. It bypassed miles of difficult mountain trackage and reduced exposure to the snow and avalanche hazards that had plagued the older route.

For collectors, Pickett's tunnel photographs have crossover appeal well beyond Washington postcards. They connect to Great Northern Railway collectors, locomotive and railroad historians, engineering history, occupational photography, and the history of major American infrastructure projects.

A strong Pickett railroad card can therefore have a much broader potential audience than a generic scenic view of the Cascades.

After the Great Northern project

Once the major tunnel work was completed, Pickett returned largely to freelance photography.

He continued documenting logging camps, mines, construction, and local businesses. Some of this work appears to have been commissioned for insurance purposes, which may help explain the unusually detailed views of machinery, buildings, and industrial sites found in his archive.

Photography was never Pickett's only occupation. He sold insurance, performed various jobs around Index, served on the town council, and worked in the Anacortes shipyards during both World Wars.

By the late 1940s, he stopped working professionally as a photographer. Pickett reportedly believed that years of exposure to photographic processing chemicals were harming his health.

He died in 1959.

Identifying Pickett photographs and postcards

Collectors most commonly recognize Pickett's work by the caption incorporated into the image.

Early examples may read Pickett Photo, Pickett Photo Co., or Pickett Photo, Index, while later photographs frequently carry wording such as Pickett. Index, Wn. A negative or catalog number often appears nearby.

These numbers are useful when researching an image because the University of Washington collection preserves many of the corresponding negatives and catalog records. A card with an obscure caption can sometimes be matched to the archival image, revealing a more precise date, location, business, or group of people.

Many surviving postcard-format Pickett images are real photographic prints and should display continuous photographic tones under magnification. However, the Pickett credit alone should not be used to classify a card as an RPPC.

His photographs continued to be reproduced after they were taken. Later commercially printed postcards exist using Pickett images, including chrome cards published by local organizations. A later printed card can therefore contain an authentic Pickett photograph without itself being an original photographic postcard.

As with other regional photographers, the object and the image need to be evaluated separately.

Larger photographic prints

Pickett also produced photographs well beyond postcard size.

The Library of Congress preserves a remarkable gelatin silver panorama of Scenic, Washington, copyrighted by Pickett Photo Company in 1914. The photograph measures approximately six inches high by three feet wide.

The University of Washington archive likewise contains glass and nitrate negatives in formats including 5-by-7, 6½-by-8½, and 8-by-10 inches.

These larger negatives help explain the exceptional detail found in some of Pickett's postcard images. A postcard may be only 3½ by 5½ inches, but the underlying negative was often considerably larger.

Original larger-format Pickett photographs are much less commonly encountered in the postcard market. When they appear, subject, format, provenance, studio markings, and relationship to the surviving archive become particularly important.

The surviving Pickett archive

Pickett's third wife, Dorothy, helped preserve his photographic legacy by giving his negatives to the University of Washington Libraries.

Today, the Lee Pickett Photograph Collection in Special Collections contains a substantial record of his career. Hundreds of images have been digitized, while the broader archive represents thousands of photographs made throughout the region.

The collection is particularly strong in Snohomish, King, and Chelan counties. Great Northern Railway construction, logging, quarrying, automobiles, recreation, and the communities of the Stevens Pass corridor are all heavily represented.

Pickett's former home in Index has also survived. It now houses the Index-Pickett Historical Museum, operated by the Index Historical Society. The museum uses Pickett's photographs alongside community collections and local artifacts to document the history of the town and surrounding Skykomish Valley.

Few regional postcard photographers have left such an accessible connection between their surviving cards, original negatives, community, and physical home.

Notes and market conditions from North West Postcards

Lee Pickett postcards are not exceptionally common, but neither does his name alone guarantee a high price.

Ordinary mountain and scenic RPPCs can appear in the $10 to $20 range. Recent dealer offerings of Pickett Mount Index views have been priced around $15 to $20, although these are asking prices rather than reliable completed-sale evidence.

The market becomes much more interesting when the subject crosses into another collecting category.

Great Northern Railway locomotives, Cascade Tunnel construction, logging operations, quarrying, early road construction, identified workers, and small-town commercial views deserve more attention than generic mountain scenery. Depending on the strength of the image and location, I would expect better examples to justify prices in the $20 to $50 range, with exceptional cards potentially moving higher.

I would be especially careful about placing blanket values on Pickett cards because public sales data is thin. A visually modest Index street scene with a rare storefront may be considerably more desirable than a spectacular but repeatedly printed view of Mount Index.

Railroad material probably offers the strongest crossover market. A card that clearly identifies a Great Northern locomotive, construction camp, engineering operation, or stage of the Cascade Tunnel project can appeal simultaneously to RPPC, Washington, railroad, and industrial-history collectors.

The same principle applies to logging. Pickett's photographs of workers on spar trees, logging railroads, loaded cars, mills, and equipment are far more compelling from a collector standpoint than an unidentified forest view.

Later printed reproductions should generally be valued separately from period photographic postcards. A chrome postcard reproducing a Pickett image may be historically interesting, but it is not equivalent to an early RPPC made during his working career.

Collector's perspective

Pickett is one of those photographers whose work becomes more interesting the longer you look at it.

The obvious attraction is the Cascades. His photographs contain granite peaks, waterfalls, forests, snow, rivers, and some of the most dramatic railroad scenery in Washington.

But the real strength of the archive is everything happening underneath those mountains.

Pickett photographed people building tunnels, cutting stone, driving muddy roads, playing basketball, working in mills, learning to ski, operating machinery, running businesses, and living in tiny railroad and logging communities scattered along the Skykomish River.

For postcard collectors, that gives his work an unusual depth.

Additional reading

• Lee Pickett Photographs of Washington State, 1909–1936, University of Washington Libraries Digital Collections.
• Lee Pickett Photograph Collection, PH Coll 580, University of Washington Libraries Special Collections.
• Index-Pickett Historical Museum, Index Historical Society.
• Scenic, Washington on the Great Northern Railway, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Example postcards