Friday Harbor Laboratories, an early version

 

Photo of one of the early iterations of what is now the University of Washington's Friday Harbor Labs.  Photo courtesy of the University of Washington's Special Collections.

The photo above dates to between 1909 and 1924, and is of a location on the shorelines of Friday Harbor on San Juan Island (about here).  The building in the forefront of the photo still sits on the shoreline, and was used as one of the early sites of what has become the University of Washington's Friday Harbor Labs.  My guess is that those tents perched on the hillside hosted students, and according to the history linked above, the site was eventually abandoned in favor of the Lab's current location here due to the steepness and muddiness of this location.  That steepness and muddiness, though, did not prevent the site from developing through time, though, and those tents have been replaced with some very high value real estate on the outskirts of the town of Friday Harbor.  Here is the contemporary view:

15 November 2020 photo of the shoreline of Friday Harbor, Washington

Friday Harbor's shoreline

 

I believe that this photo is in the special collections of the University of Washington.  Link needed though.

A short-term teaching residency at Friday Harbor Laboratories means that I will have the chance to create some of the trademark now-and-thens for the shorelines of the San Juan Islands...and where better to start than at Friday Harbor Laboratory itself.  The photo above isn't all that old...it was shot in 1952, roughly three decades after the labs took root on this spot on the northern shore of Friday Harbor.  As the labs have developed this chunk of shoreline hasn't changed all that much, outside of the growth of trees along the shoreline:

29 October 2020 photo 

I am struck by one thing though in the 1952 photo - the amount of wood that appears to be accreted to the shoreline looks to be quite a bit more than at present.  There are probably good reasons for this - logging and log transport via tug-and-raft arrangements was presumably more common in the middle of the 20th century.