There are some mysteries that likely will never be solved. That certainly seems to be the case with the unusual “whalebone tree” in front of an historic two-story home at 603 East Fourth Avenue in Ellensburg.
Anyone walking by the house might look at the massive bone, jutting from the elm tree, and assume it’s just a weird growth. But a closer look reveals it’s the jawbone of a whale, which the tree has grown around.
The mystery of Ellensburg’s whalebone tree—as in ‘why is there a whalebone seemingly attached to a tree in a community that’s more than 100 miles from the sea’—has perplexed many for decades.
While it’s clear the bone and the tree have been together for a long time, one of the first mentions of the phenomenon in local media was an April 16, 1976 article in the Ellensburg Daily Record. According to the story, there were once two whalebones that crossed at the tree’s fork.
One long-time resident, Glenn Stewart, told the paper that he can recall seeing them “loose in the tree” in 1912. Yet another, Clifford Kaynor, said he remembered seeing them leaning against the tree in 1909, when he first arrived in Ellensburg.
In its quest to see how long the bones had been there, the newspaper reproduced an 1896 photograph that showed the house sans whalebones. The paper’s supposition was that the bones were placed against the tree sometime between 1896 and 1909.
As for the lineage of the house behind the tree, that story is far clearer. The elegant wooden house was built in 1887 to serve as a parsonage by the Christian Church. The church had bought the parcel two years earlier.
Over the years, it has had a variety of owners ranging from William Sharp, who owned it from 1901 to 1912 and was an accountant for a local hay company, to Charles Lambert, who worked at the Ellensburg Lumber Company and owned it in the 1920s, to Dale and Elizabeth Otto, who owned it from the mid-1970s to 1999 (he was a Central Washington University professor for nearly 30 years).
There appears to be no record, however, of who was the first to plant the bones in front of the tree. And while some of the earliest residents hailed from the east, none appear to have been former sea captains or to have traveled cross-country to Ellensburg with bones in tow.
Since historical evidence provides few answers, what are the legends about the bones’ origins? One of the most common is that at some point in the house’s early years an ex-whaler or sailor either moved in or was staying there for a while. According to this version, this mystery mariner brought the bones with him and set them outside, apparently leaning them in a cross-wise fashion front of the tree. This was to signal to any other passing sailors that the house was a place where they could stop by and receive a warm welcome (kind of an “X” marks the spot thing). Over time, the pair of leaning bones were essentially absorbed by the tree.
A bizarre twist on this story came in the late 1990s, courtesy of Mel Waters, the mystery man who called Art Bell, host of the nationally-syndicated late-night radio show, Coast to Coast AM, to talk about the existence of an apparently bottomless opening in the ground that became known as Mel’s Hole (this was the subject of an earlier article that appeared in 1883).
Waters mentioned the whalebone tree to Bell and claimed that an old Basque man had told him the whale bone had been left behind as a marker for other Basque whalers. He did not, however, explain what it was a marker for or why Basque whalers would even be in Ellensburg.
As for why only one of the bones is no longer there, according to the Daily Record, former owner Charles Lambert apparently cut one of the whale bones free in order to give it to his boss to display in the lumber company’s offices. His son, Cecil Lambert, also told the newspaper, “My understanding is the house was built by a man named Anderson who worked on a whaling ship in the Alaska-Siberia waters. He may have put them there. My dad didn’t.”
The truth about the bones and the tree is most likely “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside of an enigma” (to steal a line from Winston Churchill). We may never know who first leaned a pair of whale’s jaw bones against an elm tree in front of a parsonage house. But it’s certainly something fun to speculate about.
