Jim and Trudy Davis remember driving by the Palindrome for decades, both thinking the iconic historic property was something special. It is.

It's theirs now.

And they're planning to use the property to make Eaglemount Wine & Cider grow, become more visible and, ideally, bring small events back to the Palindrome, which closed in 2005 after a 15-year run as a community performance venue.

“I always just thought it was beyond our reach, so I didn't consider it. When I saw it for sale again last year, I thought it would be nice, but we couldn't afford it,” recalled Trudy Davis of the property at 1893 Jacob Miller Road, just a hop to the west of State Route 20 at the entrance to Port Townsend.

News broke last summer that a community effort had begun to raise funds to buy the 12-acre Palindrome parcel. Davis' son Jesse Thomas, an architect and 1993 graduate of Port Townsend High School who works as an assistant operations manager of Eaglemount, got together with his brother, Ben Thomas, a winemaker in Oregon. They decided to have a go at it.

The Davises weren't part of that community drive and they weren't first in line for the property, which features a historic barn turned dance hall and a 1908 Craftsman-style home that was once a bed-and-breakfast. A red farm fence surrounds the property, giving it country charm.

A real estate agent told the family the owners were working with a potential buyer and backup offers were not being accepted.

“I think Jesse was the only one who felt we could actually do it,” said Trudy Davis. “I think Ben went along with him, and I thought it was a real long shot.”

Jesse and Ben Thomas drafted “Eaglemount at Arcadia,” a seven-page presentation summarizing the skills of the dreamers and the goals of a purchase plan: a cider and wine tasting room next to the Palindrome, a full-service bed-and-breakfast, event space in the Palindrome, and a biodynamic vineyard, orchard and farm – and eventually, a new winery using aromatic white grapes grown on the property.

The goal of that brochure, admitted Ben Thomas, was to “win over the sellers" and to “rally our own energies together.”

The sellers were won over, and the plan is starting to take shape – although not at once and not as quickly as the family had first hoped.

Work is progressing on the addition of a wraparound deck to the Palindrome for outdoor seating, and on the construction of a tasting room on the Palindrome's east side, which might be open in July. The winery will have to wait.

FAMILY PLANS

The property was originally known as Arcadia. The farmhouse was used as a boarding house as early as 1928, and for many years was a bed-and-breakfast. The barn was used as a dance hall starting in the 1920s. The Flying Karamazov Brothers juggling troupe owned it from 1986 to 2000 and had it remodeled into a practice and rehearsal space; they gave it the name “The Palindrome: Never odd or even.”

Ben Thomas remembers those days well. He was in Chautauqua for nine years, the circus troupe that the Karamazov Brothers started in 1981.

“That was one of my attachments to the property, besides having gone to countless Palindrome events in the 90s and early 2000s,” Ben Thomas remembers.

The property itself then became known locally as the Palindrome, rather than the historic name of Arcadia.

The home's dining room is now a sort of planning headquarters for the family and friends involved. Dogs plop on couches as their owners post project plans on the walls. Everyone meets regularly for updates.

For a few minutes one May day, they reflected on how they got to this point.

After Jesse Thomas contacted the real estate agent and shared his dream plans, the owners – Madeleine Houston and Daniel Hauptman – asked to meet with the family.

“Ben and I worked on this presentation and we all sat down with the owners, and we were surprised,” Jesse Thomas said. “They were so happy with what we wanted to do,” Jim Davis recalled.

Everyone was surprised, happy, maybe a bit giddy.

The sale closed on Oct. 2, 2014, with the owners agreeing to carry the contract for a total of $668,000.

Since then, there has been a lot of talk, along with some hammering and polishing, with all of them contributing sweat equity. Jesse Thomas creates the drawings, and paints, scraps and builds. Ben Thomas and his girlfriend, Claire Cunningham, a wine marketer and sommelier, have planted 550 grapes. Jim Davis has been cutting grass, welding steel braces to help mount a table top on the bar, and more. Trudy Davis is keeping the books and tabs on finances to ensure everyone gets paid.

Everyone is working two jobs, with their eyes on the Palindrome property as their future, a family future that would bring Ben and Jesse Thomas together with Jim and Trudy Davis to create a two-generation wine and events venture.

CHANGE OF PLANS

Within weeks of buying the property, family members said, they sought permission from Jefferson County's Department of Community Development (DCD). In a pre-application meeting, they said, they gave planners the same presentation they had given the owners.

Jesse Thomas said DCD planners initially told them they could do everything they wanted with a conditional-use permit under a designation called small-scale tourism recreation. But five months later, a new planner came on board and gave the owners notice that they would need to do a binding site plan, one that would cost them $10,000 for DCD's services alone.

Though that fee situation has since changed, it was weighing on the owners in mid-May when they first met with the Port Townsend & Jefferson County Leader to talk about what they thought would be a story about the imminent opening of their tasting room at the Palindrome, complete with a new deck overlooking the vineyard.

Since then, the family has hired a consultant, David Goldsmith, a former Jefferson County administrator, who also is helping Finnriver Farm and Cidery develop its expansion plans in Chimacum.

“David is working with DCD, and we seem to be getting somewhere,” Jesse Thomas said hopefully on May 29.

The big initial plan of a winery moving to the property isn't feasible for now, but opening the Palindrome to events, opening the bed-and-breakfast and getting the tasting room up and running are in the works. A plan for campsites, a bathhouse and little cabins has been dropped.

“We need to be open in July. We need some extra revenue and we need to get it open,” Jesse Thomas said on Monday as he stood inside the empty tasting room, which smells like fresh varnish, its floors still sticky from one coat and needing another.

Jesse Thomas acknowledged that it's taken far more work than they had ever thought.

Brother Ben Thomas, the founder of Vigilance, an alternative newspaper in Port Townsend from 2000 to 2005, picks his words carefully when discussing permits: “The bureaucracy seems, at the very least, ‘uncuddly,’” he said in an email.

“So we are focusing on the tasting room and the events and winery space and the bed-and-breakfast,” said Trudy Davis, who is scrambling to get people paid without the infusion of revenue that the tasting room could have brought in this summer, had the process gone a bit faster.

A planner from the county's DCD did not return a call on June 1 for comment on the time concerns regarding the permitting process.

PAST AND FUTURE

While the Palindrome represents the future, Eaglemount Wine & Cider is still front and center as the family business. And it has a rich history.

The Eaglemount tasting room is housed on a homestead that dates back to 1883. Trudy and Jim Davis live in a log home also built in that period. And the orchard that supplies them with heirloom apples for their cider dates back to that time as well.

Everything about Eaglemount harks back to the big-tree days of the Northwest. Even the bottles they use – which Sunset magazine deemed one of the best 49 bottles in the world back in 2012 – have a vintage feel to them.

But their current tasting room is a bit off the beaten path, 12 miles from Port Townsend on Eaglemount Road. Directions on their website note that “GPS is not always accurate in delivering you to our scenic rural tasting room.” It's off by about 200 feet, they said.

“We have a quarter-mile dirt road off Eaglemount Road. We're pretty remote here and out of the way for people,” said Trudy Davis.

“So we will have much more visability and we'll be able to do more things,” Trudy Davis said of moving the tasting room closer to Port Townsend. “Here, we are limited by water and infrastructure.”

Since starting the winery and cidery in 2006, Eaglemount has grown from producing 2,000 gallons a year to 9,000 gallons in 2014, and from having no employees to six or seven staff members, two of whom are full-time.

“We don't have any grants or anything. It's really a family business. Everyone is local. We didn't bring anyone else in,” said Trudy Davis, who has a master's degree in environmental health and toxicology, and worked for Boeing for years in Seattle. That is where she met Jim Davis, a longshoreman who owned the Eaglemount property.

“It's a hobby gone wild,” she said of learning the business as an assistant winemaker at Hoodsport Winery. There's a lot of experimenting that goes on in making cider and wine, working with grapes, special barrels, timing, fermentation.

“The business pulls us along. We say, 'Oh, we've got to do this. We've got to do that.' It's quite an adventure,” said Trudy Davis.

Now that they have the Arcadia property, the owners are hoping they can make it even more special as a community asset.

“Eaglemount's success in the cider industry, Ben Thomas' recognition as a leading winemaker in the Oregon pinot noir industry, and the talents brought by the Eaglemount team would make the Arcadia property acquisition and expansion a positive addition to the local community,” Ben and Jesse Thomas wrote in their property-winning sales pitch almost a year ago.

“We're going to open it for events right away, but it will be small events,” Ben Thomas said on Monday. When? “As soon as we get our permit, like the day of.”