A small sign near the entrance to Wetherill Nature Preserve describes the place plainly: a "natural place, a habitat." Sixteen acres of big-leaf maple, willow, and a few surviving apple trees, tucked into the south end of Cozy Cove, walkable in well under an hour. Most people who live on Hunts Point have crossed through it, cut behind Town Hall to reach it, or driven past its entrance a thousand times on the way to somewhere else.

What fewer people stop to consider is how strange it is that this land exists at all, in this particular town, on this particular peninsula. Hunts Point is 205 acres, or about three-tenths of a square mile, and by the late 1970s it was almost entirely built out. Sixteen of those acres, nearly eight percent of the entire town, will never hold a house. That fact did not happen by accident of geography. It happened because two women in 1988 made a decision that ran directly against the instinct that founded the town in the first place.

The Man Who Bought a Point to Clear It

Hunts Point takes its name from Leigh S. J. Hunt, a Yarrow Point resident who bought the still-unnamed peninsula on March 13, 1890. He wanted the land specifically so he could cut down the tall evergreen trees at the point's end, which were blocking his view of Lake Washington. That is the founding transaction of the town: a man who saw trees as an obstruction to be removed rather than a feature to be kept.

For the better part of a century, that logic more or less won. The point passed to a group of Seattle men who used it for Sunday picnics and summer camping around 1900, and settlement filled in from there.

A Town That Ran Out of Room

By 1955, Hunts Point had incorporated as its own town, and the very first thing its new council did was write development rules. Three weeks after incorporation became official on August 22, 1955, the town adopted a set of codes setting minimum lot sizes, work that fell to resident and attorney John Ehrlichman, who served as town attorney through the 1950s and well into the 1960s before moving to Washington, D.C. to work in the Nixon administration. Those minimum lot requirements were still on the books at 12,000 square feet as of a 2015 town history. Within two decades of incorporation, nearly every buildable parcel had a house on it.

That is the context worth holding onto: a town this small, this thoroughly built out, this early. Once nearly all 205 acres were spoken for, there was no obvious mechanism left to set any of it permanently aside. Land in a town like this gets subdivided, sold, and built on. It does not typically get taken off the table.

Sixteen Acres With a Catch

It got taken off the table anyway. According to Hunts Point's own town records, the Wetherill Nature Preserve was created on July 4, 1988, when sisters Marjorie Baird and Sidonia Foley bequeathed sixteen acres of family land to the towns of Hunts Point and Yarrow Point, with a condition attached: the towns had to protect the land in perpetuity from development and preserve its native wildlife and plants. The land had belonged to their grandfather, Seattle financier Jacob Furth, and to generations of the Furth family after him. The sisters dedicated the gift to their parents, Sidonia Furth Wetherill and Army Colonel Alexander Wetherill.

Run the numbers and the preserve works out to a little more than seven percent of the town's entire land area, permanently exempted from the pattern that consumed the rest of the peninsula within a generation of incorporation. In a town governed by minimum lot sizes since 1955, that is not a small gesture. It is a deed restriction that outlasts every zoning code the town council could ever write, because no council can undo a gift condition made in perpetuity.

Before It Was a Preserve, It Was a Farm

The land's history between the Furth family's ownership and its 1988 gift adds a layer that most visitors never learn from the trail itself. The Furth family's summer home once stood on the site, and when Lake Washington was lowered almost nine feet in 1916 and 1917 to create the Lake Washington Ship Canal, the property expanded to include newly exposed waterfront. That fertile bottomland was leased out from the 1920s into the 1940s to the Saiki family, who grew strawberries and vegetables on it. After the forced wartime internment of local Japanese American families, the abandoned fields became a sheep pasture, and later grew into the woods that stand there now.

It is a detail the preserve's own signage does not dwell on, but it is part of the record, and it means the sixteen acres carry more than one story about who gets to use land and on what terms.

What the Walk Actually Looks Like

The entrance most residents use sits about halfway between Hunts Point and Yarrow Point along the Points Loop Trail, the walking and biking route that links all four of the Points communities, Clyde Hill, Hunts Point, Medina, and Yarrow Point. Parking is limited to a few spots near Hunts Point Town Hall and along D.K. McDonald Park, which also serves as the starting point for the walk east along the bike path toward the preserve.

The trail network winds through a wetland habitat below a canopy of trees, with waterfowl, blooming wildflowers in spring, and fish visible along the Lake Washington shoreline. At the Cozy Cove end, the preserve's own description holds up on repeat visits: a kingfisher chattering from the water's edge, or an eagle dropping into the lily pads to bathe. From the shoreline itself, walkers get two distinct sightlines north across the water, framed by the same maples and willows that have stood since before the town existed in its current form.

A short connector links Wetherill to Fairweather Nature Preserve, a separate half-mile loop with an open grassy field, two tennis courts, and its own stretch of wooded trail. Combined, the two preserves give the Points communities a continuous, mostly shaded walk of a little over four miles, longer than most people expect from a corner of the map this small.

The Cove Before the Bridges

Cozy Cove's quiet today is easy to mistake for the way it has always been. Before the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge and the two Lake Washington bridges connected the Eastside to Seattle by car, residents commuted by ferry. The steamer Gazelle arrived at Cozy Cove each morning at 7:15 a.m., and a clubhouse built in 1913 at what is now 3655 Hunts Point Road served as the center of the town's social life through the 1920s. The cove that now hosts kingfishers and a handful of walkers each morning was once the town's literal front door.

That layered history is what makes the preserve worth more than a passing glance. The same water that once carried a commuter ferry on a fixed schedule now sits still enough to reflect maple branches. The same family whose grandfather's fortune once financed a summer estate chose, two generations later, to give the land away rather than subdivide it.

Leigh Hunt bought his point to remove the trees in his way. Marjorie Baird and Sidonia Foley gave sixteen acres of theirs so the trees, and the wetland beneath them, would never be in anyone's way to remove. Both decisions were made by people with every legal right to do what they wanted with their land. Only one of them is still standing.

That is the quiet argument the preserve makes every time someone walks it: not every acre in a town this small has to end up under a roof, and the ones that don't tend to say more about the place than the ones that do.

If you already call Hunts Point home, you have likely walked past this history without knowing its shape. And if you are weighing what it means to hold property in a town where land this scarce has, at least once, been deliberately set aside rather than sold, The Gray Team spends its days thinking about exactly that kind of question on the Eastside's waterfront. Reach out for a confidential valuation and private consultation whenever you are ready to talk through what your own corner of the Points is actually worth.