Port Crescent, Revisited from the Water

We’ve posted about the lost logging town of Port Crescent on this blog before, but there are so many great historical photos of the townsite, it’s worth revisiting. This time our view is from the waterside with the 500 ft. wharf and Markham hotel just as prominent as in our previous post.

Port Crescent then (1902) and now (June 2021)

As always, I encourage you to examine the historical photo (another from the Bert Kellogg Collection) on the Washington Rural Heritage website. The most interesting details to me are the train engine on the wharf and the tug tied up at the end of the wharf.

Port Crescent was booming in the late 1800’s, along with many towns on the Olympic Peninsula. At its peak, the town was populated by between 600-700 people. The timber industry and prospects of becoming the terminus of a transcontinental railroad line brought investors and money.

In 1890, three Clallam County towns were in competition to be the country seat, at the time located in New Dungeness. Port Crescent and New Dungeness lost out to Port Angeles and the rest is history. The railroad never came to Port Crescent and neither of the losing towns exist today.   

As a bonus, here is a second view of Port Crescent facing west from the water. You can view the original historical photo here. 

Port Crescent then (date unknown) and now (June 2021)

References:

• https://historylink.org/File/7587
• Tracks, Trails, and Tails in Clallam County, State of Washington by Harriet Fish

The Dungeness Pier, a look to the south

For a while I've been wanting to try to replicate this 1909 photo looking south from  a spot out in Dungeness Bay (about here):

1909 photo looking south, taken from the deck of the old Dungeness pier.  Photo from the Burt Kellogg collection.  

There are a few things that are just arresting about this photo - notably that its a panorama view, made of multiple photos physically aligned and presumably taped or glued together, and that it was taken from the now-gone Dungeness pier.  The pier was really quite long...3/4 mile when it was originally built in 1890-91...and it really had to be to reach deep water at the edge of the active delta of the Dungeness River.  This pier was the key bit of infrastructure connecting the products derived from forests, ag land and waterways of the Sequim prairie to the rest of the world, and the pier served the larger cargo boats and ferries that were calling at Dungeness at the time.

I finally had the chance today to try to recreate this view while I was on my way out to Dungeness Spit by boat:

9 June 2021 photo looking south from the water...

Its actually quite hard to confirm that I've got it exactly right...but its close at least.  The mountains provide good clues in the background, but today's clouds obscured some key summits.  Interestingly its really quite hard to place some of the closer landscape features in the historic photo, perhaps because the landscape has changed so dramatically in this area (it is, after all, an active river delta).  This paper by the University of Washington's Brian Collins is a really fascinating and rich description of those changes...and well worth a look, if not a full read.  

 According to this article the dock served a useful life for about 50 years, after which it decayed until its removal as part of a restoration project in 2018-19.  Its still visible in many aerial photographs, and of course blog co-conspirator Shanon Dell had the same idea as I did, but acted on it much sooner, collecting this photo in December 2014, before the pier remnants were removed:

December 2014 photo by Shanon Dell