Margaret "Kit" Ellis (b. 1945) manages the 195-acre Ellis Family Forest near Gig Harbor. The forest is on the same land that her mother purchased in 1956, when Kit was 11 years old. Ellis learned about forest management by watching her mother, Phyllis Todd Ellis (1916-1995), a war widow, care for and harvest the Douglas fir, Western Redcedar, and Western hemlock that surrounded their home on Maloney Lake. Ellis studied at the University of Washington and went on to teach chemistry at Seattle Central College. Ellis regularly returned to the family forest to help her mother manage it. She took over management of the farm when her mother died in 1995. In this May 2025 interview with HistoryLink's Jill Freidberg, Ellis discusses losing the family farm in New Jersey to eminent domain, her mother's struggles to manage a small forest alone, the family's efforts to form a land trust and place the land in a conservation easement, and the spectrum of support systems that have emerged over the years for small forest landowners. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
From the Garden State to the Evergreen State
Kit Ellis: I was born in New Jersey in August 1945. My father had gone missing in action in World War II, just two months before I was born. So, mom raised me on the land that they had a mortgage on in New Jersey, farmland. It was a lovely place. Central, pretty close to the coast. I remember a pond that had snapping turtles that I was warned away from.
Mom had planted a whole lot of nut trees. Being so far before the internet, her way of learning about nut tree culture was being an active member of the Northern Nut Growers Association. She had planted a bunch of trees, and they were just about to produce their first commercial crop when the Garden State Parkway was dreamed up, and they took a chunk of the farm by eminent domain.
So, we were pushed off the land, and, by 1956, Mom decided that she wanted to go west. She'd had enough of New Jersey. We came out here in July of 1956 and Mom acquired these 195 acres with the funds she got from New Jersey -- $40,000.
She was the perfect example of land-rich, cash-poor.
And of course, she needed to generate revenue. But she really loved this land. She'd been a serious observer of natural systems. The idea that a forest is more healthy when it's more diverse, rather than plantations of Douglas fir, for example. She'd had ideas like that from at least when she was on the land in New Jersey.
I went into sixth grade when we moved out here. It was rather isolated until I could drive. Mom had to take me miles in any direction. There was a theater in downtown Gig Harbor. There was no swimming pool on this side of the [Tacoma] Narrows Bridge.
One of the things that Mom and I did together was pick huckleberry and salal brush. It didn't pay very well, but there were no additional costs involved in growing it. And it was a nice way to be out in the woods. And I obviously learned a lot about the woods without any pressure to learn about what's in the woods. That was a way to get spending money without depleting Mom's not very large resources.
Head Pats and Clear-Cuts
KE: Mom had to deal with a lot of figurative head patting and condescension. A lot of her contracts were written to "Mrs. Edward P. Ellis," because that was the way women were addressed, even though my father died in 1945. I remember people not having confidence that she knew what she was doing here, when the foresters had all learned about clear-cuts, and ecological forestry hadn't been "invented" yet.
We'd go to the farm forestry meetings and she'd be out in the kitchen making coffee and putting out cookies but also listening for everything that the speaker and the discussion had to contribute. She was really good at synthesizing all sorts of relevant ideas.
She was outdoors the majority of every day, as I remember. And she was always taking branches off trees that seemed to be competing with something lower down that she wanted to favor. I think she was just a very good observer of what works and what doesn't.
She recognized that this was a very important chunk of land in terms of habitat for a variety of animals, water catchment. So, everybody gets to draw more water out of the aquifer if we collect it in the first place, instead of having it just run off back into the salt water.
But being able to get an income off the land was important to her also. I was reading the papers relating to the first logging she had done, and I have a pretty strong memory. She had some difference of opinion with the people who were choosing which trees to take. The loggers were taking the non-merchantable wood for their own firewood. They were using the stream beds for bathrooms. They were dragging trees that were being taken out against the trees that were supposed to be left. A certain amount of damage is okay, but too much and those trees to be left will die also. So, it was just a sort of sloppiness that was not her style. She was very slow and deliberate and careful in everything she did.
Teaching Chemistry
KE: I went to the University of Washington primarily, I'm afraid, because my boyfriend was going to the University of Washington. We went from Peninsula High School to University of Washington. We were in the honors program. I was debating between forestry and chemistry. At some point, I pretty much decided that I'd have more flexibility in how I earned a living with chemistry rather than going into forestry. I do regret not having taken advantage of all the forestry coursework that was available to me, but I didn't do it. I taught. I taught community college chemistry and loved doing it.
Once I was in the classroom with all the nursing students who were absolutely petrified of chemistry, thought it didn't have a thing to do with what they wanted to learn. I got really good at bringing in real-world examples of the various concepts.
It was great fun, taught me a lot of different science. I think the science background, even though it wasn't in botany or forestry, made me a more critical listener in the best sense of the word.
[Editor’s note: The Ellis Family Forest is on land that was settled by William Maloney in 1901, when he moved his family from Ontario, Canada. The lake that is just outside the Ellis family home is called Maloney Lake and was the site of a small sawmill in the 1940s, when some portion of the land was partially logged.]
Land Trusts and Conservation Easements
KE: As Mom got older and was more concerned that the land be maintained in its undivided condition, my mother, Phyllis Todd Ellis (d. 1995), my husband at the time, Hugh Stout, and I explored everything we could think of in terms of agencies, organizations, whatever might help us figure out what the best way would be to keep this land forested primarily for wildlife habitat, water catchment, and being able to generate an income off the land.
We worked with a lot of different good organizations and finally decided that having a land trust in this area was really the appropriate solution to the problem. There wasn't a land trust in this area, but we made our case to the Hood Canal Land Trust based in Belfair and they agreed to accept a conservation easement on the condition that we would transfer it to a more local land trust. And they asked that we help form a more local land trust.
And we did. That was the Peninsula Heritage Land Trust based in Gig Harbor, but we never did transfer the conservation easement. It wasn't until 2000 -- when Hood Canal Land Trust, Peninsula Heritage Land Trust, Indianola Land Trust, and Kitsap Land Trust merged to make Great Peninsula Conservancy -- that the conservation easement was swept into GPC's portfolio.
First of all, our conservation easement, we wrote ourselves with the guidance of the only book that was around on the topic in the late ‘80s. We chose to require that the land be kept primarily forested, and we made ourselves a very tight control over that. Ten percent of the standing timber in any ten-year period was the limit on how much could be taken off the land.
The land was already second-growth. I talked to my logger a couple days ago. And he said from the slices they took and counted that he thinks there was logging in the 1910s.
We did have salvage logging done with horses, which was amazing, after an ice storm and heavy winds that pushed a lot of big trees over. And I thought that it would be less jarring on Mom because she still had bad memories from the early logging. I thought it would be easier on her to use the horse logging. It was interesting because we had mountain beavers, a single genus, single species. They make terrible holes, and if a horse stepped in one of those, [you] probably have to put it out of its misery. So, Jack [Rawls] was very careful to keep the horses on the roads. And that meant that some of the logs -- they couldn't get the whole thing out. They were just too heavy or too far. Everything has its pros and cons.
I've pretty recently had a commercial thinning done that's really opened up the woods beautifully. This had been growing pretty much unlimited until the trees competed for the same resources and the big guy won and the others just died. A certain amount of that dead stuff just puts nutrients back in the soil, but some of it also is cutting down the rate of growth that's possible for the healthy ones.
Before I did this recent logging, I had had a contract with an independent forester who wasn't concerned about staying within the conservation easement limitations. First, I could have been sued for violating it. The land trust could have been sued for violating it. There's an agreement with the IRS [Internal Revenue Service] because there's a charitable donation involved if you give up something of value. And we had. So, I'm very glad I waited and worked with a reputable organization to do things properly.
Growing Support for Small Forest Landowners
KE: I should mention that over the many years that this has been a managed forest with Ellis as part of its name. It's been wonderful to see how the support for small forest landowners has increased.
Mom worked a great deal with men who were known in forestry in Western Washington as being really helpful to anybody who would ask. I've been aware of the Pierce County Farm Forestry Association for a long time because they used to meet in a little community building near Purdy. And that was where I remember going to meetings and Mom really listening hard.
And it was somewhat after that, maybe after I was an adult, that I really started being aware that there was a statewide umbrella organization, Washington Farm Forestry Association. And then there were, gosh, maybe six regional groups in Western Washington, and I'm not sure how many in Eastern Washington.
DNR (Department of Natural Resources) has over time been really helpful with special tools and skills. The county conservation districts either have their own forestry staff or have a cooperative agreement with an adjacent county to provide assistance. They've gotten really good at making sure they have a presence at all the meetings and field trips that involve small forest land owners. And they say, "Here's what we can help with. For your problem, we'd suggest the program this other agency has." It's terrific.
While we were in the process of writing up the conservation easement and looking for a non-profit to accept it, Mom worked a lot with Don Theo and Ruth Milner. Don was a highly respected DNR forester, and Ruth Milner was the wildlife biologist with Department of Fish and Wildlife. They wrote a wonderful management plan to help guide what we did from that point on. And it doesn't mean that we did it. But it was so thorough in giving an accounting of what was here, both in terms of marketable trees and other trees and all sorts of wildlife information.
In a way, it was like a gift book with all these things that we didn't really know explicitly were here or how they were doing.
Taking Over the Farm
KE: And then Mom died in 1995.
My having to renew the tree farm certification, it was clear I needed an updated management plan because the tree farm program had changed quite a bit since we were first certified as a tree farm in 1962. And they needed some evidence that we were doing ecological forestry. And they wanted to know what we were planning to do in the future.
And by then, I realized that, in spite of having taken a wonderful course through WSU (Washington State University) Extension Forestry that was designed to help people write their own management plans based on identifying different parcels -- self-defined parcels of land that had similar characteristics -- and working through those to determine what to do next there and there and there, I had too many.
So, I contracted with a non-profit called Northwest Natural Resource Group (NNRG). And they wrote me such a terrific management plan that felt as if I had gone through a formal forestry course. They talked about the specifics of what I had and what, to them, looked like the reasonable things to do next. It was sort of rescuing me from being overwhelmed with this wonderful forest that I'd kind of been ignoring. [They were] saying not doing anything was preferable to doing the wrong thing.
So, that guided me into having commercial thinning done. Since I didn't have anything young around, this is all very mature forest. And aside from the complaints that appeared on Facebook when people encountered logging equipment over on the county road and just assumed that I was going to build a Walmart over there or apartments … Wrong! Now what I hear is, "Oh, the woods look just wonderful. Thank you so much."
So, I've been taking advantage of all the things that these agencies have been offering in the way of field days, where people go sit, watch a presentation, you know, out in the wild. And all those things that probably to a large extent went over my head when I was younger, now I realize really made a difference. I just didn't have all the details in mind. We had forest pathologists, people who studied all the insects, and emerald ash borer being one of the current ones we're watching out for. Lots of eyes on the ground now who have been educated rather painlessly by these wonderful people really committed to what they do.
I'm very appreciative of being able to get a cost share arrangement with USDA Natural Resource Conservation Service that allowed us to do something pretty massive and to hire a team to do the planting. It's something over 2,000 trees. My funding is helping with restoring a root rot pocket that's sizable. And if I had been willing to move more quickly, I would have been able to salvage a bunch of big trees. I was stubborn. I didn't like my options at the time, so I just let them die and they're breaking down fine going back to the earth.
But it's an opportunity to do two things. One is plant trees and shrubs that are absolutely native here. The other is to deal with the warming and drying climate that I see here. So, we've planted a bunch of Redwoods. We've planted a bunch of Western Redcedar from farther south so that it's likely to be more adapted to our hotter, drier summers than cedars that genetically are from here. I've got my fingers crossed. Partly it's an experiment, but so is planting Douglas fir where it's just going to die from the root rot diseases that are in the soil. It's endemic, so it's not something that was brought in. It's just part of how things grow or die around here.
So it's been a really uplifting experience to be involved in all of this.
