Topic: Maritime
The Admiralty Head Lighthouse, built in 1903 by the Army Corps of Engineers, is located in Fort Casey State Park near Coupeville on Whidbey Island. The beacon, high on a bluff, 127 feet above sea leve...
In Washington, a national leader in both farm production and international trade, agricultural exports played a key role in development from the early years of non-Indian settlement. As steamboats car...
Alki Point, today part of West Seattle, stretches into Puget Sound to form the southern boundary of Elliott Bay. It is part of a much larger area originally inhabited by the Duwamish Indians. In Septe...
For more than 50 years, the tugboat Anne W. worked Northwest waters, much of the time hauling barges from a gravel pit in Steilacoom to the shores of Lake Union in Seattle. Before being retired from s...
The Ballard Boat Works was started as one of 20 maritime shipyards operating in the Ballard area of Seattle in the early 20th century. Sivert Sagstad, the shipyard's founder, built a variety of fishin...
The first steamship to operate in the eastern Pacific Ocean was the HMS Beaver, a stout little craft commissioned by the Hudson's Bay Company. She saw continuous service from 1835 until July 26, 1888,...
In 1852, two Californians in search of site for a lumber mill arrived at the mouth of northwest Washington's Whatcom Creek, on the edge of the Puget Sound. The spot was close to the forests and strea...
In this memoir Steve Kink describes growing up in Bellingham's Slav fishing community. Steve's grandparents, Paul Kink (originally Kinkusich) and Maria (Evich) Kink, emigrated to Bellingham from Croat...
Located where the Nisqually River empties into southern Puget Sound on the Pierce-Thurston county border, the Billy Frank Jr. Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge protects the river's estuary, providing...
For residents of the San Juan Islands in the late nineteenth century, receiving and sending mail and parcels offered special challenges of distance and isolation. It might be months before a letter po...
The Browns Point Lighthouse was built in 1933 by the U.S. Lighthouse Service, and marks the hazardous shoal and north entrance to Tacoma's Commencement Bay. It was first marked in 1887 with a post lan...
The opening of Seattle's Lake Washington Ship Canal in 1917 spurred the development on Lake Union of a number of boat-building yards that for more than 40 years used traditional methods and materials ...
Reef-net fishing technology is unique to the Salish Sea, where it was devised at least 1,800 years ago as a way to intercept vast midsummer runs of sockeye salmon as they passed through the San Juans ...
Coast Salish peoples of the San Juan Islands and southern Gulf Islands used their unique reef-net fishing technology to harvest large quantities of sockeye salmon as the fish passed through the island...
The Colman Clock of the Seattle Ferry Terminal at Colman Dock has truly taken a licking, but keeps on ticking. Over the past hundred years, since 1908 when it arrived, the clock has been dunked into P...
Scottish-born James Murray Colman arrived in Seattle in 1872 at the age of 40 to lease and operate Yesler's sawmill. Colman was a prime mover in organizing the Seattle & Walla Walla Railroad after...
From canoes to container ships, a variety of vessels have carried people and goods between Elliott Bay and the wider world for thousands of years. The introduction of new technologies, such as canoes,...
Immigrants from Croatia were part of the population of the Skagit County port city of Anacortes from its first boom years, and played an important role in the rise of the city's fishing industry. This...
David Rodgers (1864-1923) was a master shipfitter who lived in the Puget Sound region from around 1900 until his death in 1923. He made significant contributions to the nation's war efforts during Wor...
Of Washington's 75 public port districts, only 11 -- the ports of Seattle, Grays Harbor, Vancouver, Everett, Tacoma, Bellingham, Kalama, Longview, Olympia, Port Angeles, and Anacortes -- have deep-dra...
Orion Denny, the first non-Native boy born in Seattle, made careers both on the water and on land. The son of Seattle pioneers Arthur Denny (1822-1899) and Mary Boren Denny (1822-1912), Orion worked a...
The Dofflemyer Point Lighthouse, the southernmost light in Puget Sound, marks an important turning point for ships entering Budd Inlet. Located seven miles north of Olympia in Boston Harbor, it was Pu...
Part 1 of this reminiscence was originally published in North Seattle Press. In it Greenlake resident Dorothea Nordstrand (1916-2011) recalls the exciting occasion when her father first took her salmo...
In A. D. 458, a Chinese adventurer named Hwui Shan crossed the Pacific to Mexico, and then followed the Japan current north to Alaska. Centuries later, in September 1513, Vasco Nunez de Balboa "discov...