The historic mill town of Monohon was located on the south eastern shore of Lake Sammamish. The area was named after Martin Monohon, who homesteaded it in 1877. By 1906, there were 20 homes in Monohon. Five years later, it boasted a population of 300 and had a post office with 125 letter boxes, reflecting the growth of the surrounding area. Monohon also had a railroad depot, meeting hall and hotel.
The mill had a cutting capacity of 120,000 board feet daily, enough to build about 20 small houses a day. The loading track could service 20 rail cars at the same time. On June 26, 1925, Monohon was destroyed by a fire that started in the sawmill. All that remained in the community after the fire was a large, steel sawdust burner, ten company homes and the horse barn. Though it was rebuilt, the mill never came back to its earlier production capacity, and in 1980, after a series of fires, it was closed for good.
Monohon had a two-room schoolhouse, two teachers and an average attendance of 50 students in the 1920s. Church services were first held in the schoolhouse on Sunday afternoons. Eventually, a youth club called The Busy Bees helped construct a building for church services.
Sahalee was first envisioned in 1965, when members from the Inglewood Country Club and Broadmoor Golf Club decided that the greater Seattle area needed a championship golf course. In 1967, Par Golf, Inc. acquired land on the Sammamish Plateau east of Redmond that eventually became Sahalee.
Ted Robinson, a nationally renowned golf course architect, created a course capable of sponsoring any USGA or PGA national event. Louie Schmidt was hired as Golf Course Superintendent in charge of construction and maintenance. Eight men eventually became the first Sahalee Board of Trustees: Carl Jonson, Dixon Ervin, Harry Wilson, Hal Logan, Maury Proctor, Richard Strand, Gene Lynn and Jack Wright. They chose the name Sahalee, or “High Heavenly Ground” in the language of the native Chinook to create the character of the golf course and surrounding area.
In 2001, the old clubhouse was torn down and replaced with a new 43,000 square foot facility boasting expanded dining and locker room facilities, but most importantly, a design and décor that vividly showcases the natural beauty of Sahalee.
With the success of the ’98 PGA Championship, support from the community and the state, and the tremendous praise from the players and the PGA, Sahalee has begun a new chapter in an increasingly rich golf tradition. Sahalee has hosted the NEC World Golf Championship in 2002, the USGA Senior Open in 2010, and hosted the 2016 KPMG Women’s PGA Championship.
Inglewood was located on the eastern shore of Lake Sammamish. It was an almost-town which instead became a community between the 1890s and the 1930s. Its legacy lives on in what is today the northern part of the city of Sammamish. Kroll Atlas maps from the early twentieth century show that the plat formed a square starting on the eastern shore of Lake Sammamish and running east along NE 16th Street (just north of Inglewood Hill Road) to 212th Avenue NE, then south across Inglewood Hill Road to NE Eighth Street, west back to the lake, and then north again.
Only three weeks after the town was platted, the Inglewood Post Office was established on August 21, 1889. John Ayer was the first postmaster. Between 1890 and 1894 both Charles Gunther and his wife Theresia ran the post office.
A 1901 Polk’s business directory lists the Inglewood community with a population of 25. But the community’s growth accelerated rapidly during the first decade of the twentieth century, aided by the establishment of the Lake Sammamish Shingle Company by Joseph Weber in September 1901 and the addition of a second single mill several years later. There was an Inglewood Grammar School and Service Station.
The 1910 Census for the Inglewood precinct paints a considerably different picture of the local population than what exists there a century later. In April 1910, 185 non-Indians were recorded in the Inglewood precinct, living mostly on or near the eastern shore of Lake Sammamish. More than 30 percent of these inhabitants reported they had been born in countries other than the United States; two-thirds of those came from the Scandinavian countries of Sweden, Norway, and Finland. Few non-Indians were actually “from” Inglewood. In fact, only 20 percent of these inhabitants reported that they had even been born in Washington state, and of these 36 people, all but five of them were under the age of 21.
The Sammamish Heritage Society 