Another view of New Dungeness Lighthouse

We’ve visited New Dungeness Lighthouse in a previous post, but it’s such a unique spot, it’s worth looking at from multiple angles. My bucket list goal for this blog is to find a historical photo taken from the top of the lighthouse that looks out toward the end of Dungeness Spit. The reason? Due to the erosion of nearby bluffs and the currents in the Strait of Juan de Fuca that carry the eroded material to the east, Dungeness Spit lengthens by around 15 feet per year. When built in 1857, the lighthouse was only 900 feet from the end of the spit. It’s now more than a half mile from the end. I hope to someday find a historical photo that will allow us to document that growth.

In the meantime, our now and then photos show some of the changes that occurred at the lighthouse itself, which has also evolved significantly over time.

Then: 1896, courtesy National Archives / Now: Feb. 2021

Yes, those photos are of the same lighthouse. The tower was lowered in 1927 due to deterioration of the brickwork. So the dark section above is now gone. Many other buildings have been added and subtracted since our Then photo was taken in 1896. Most notably, the keeper’s home was added in 1904 (on the right in the Now photo).

My now photo is from a perspective a little lower in the water then the then photo because I was shooting while sitting on my paddleboard and I presume the historical photo was taken from a boat with a much higher deck.

Seeing the outer fence in the historical photo reminded me of my favorite New Dungeness Lighthouse story. It’s from a book written by James C. Isom, published by the New Dungeness Light Station Association, and aptly titled, History of the New Dungeness Lighthouse. The book tells us that keeper E.A. Brooks (1902-1925) kept cows and sheep on the spit, and apparently the cows weren’t too happy with the location:

“Several keepers likely had cows on the spit, particularly if there were small children…The Brooks family had a cow that would sometimes swim to the mainland in search of better grass. The boys would have to find the cow and drag it home for milking.”

If I was paddling out to the lighthouse and passed a cow headed for the mainland, I think I might have to give up paddling. 😊

Sources: 

https://www.sequimgazette.com/news/mother-nature-and-the-dungeness-spit/
https://newdungenesslighthouse.com/the-lighthouse/
https://catalog.archives.gov/id/45708329?&sp=%7B%22q%22%3A%22dungeness%22%7D&sr=1

Patos Island Light Station

 

1940 photo, taken from the water (about here), of the Patos Island lighthouse station. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

Patos Island is one of the outer islands in the San Juan archipelago, and has been a point of fascination for my family this fall due to the riveting stories in Helene Glidden's Light on the Island.  We were eager to make a trip out to the island to explore the light station and try to place the many stories in the book, which is a fictionalized account of Helene Glidden's childhood there in the early 20th century.  Patos Island is out there (20 nautical miles from Friday Harbor) and exposed (weather conditions have to be good) but we finally made the trip and found that, unlike many of the light stations around the Salish Sea that we have visited (and that are featured in this blog), the modern scene on Patos looks quite a bit different:

28 November 2020 photo of the Patos Island light station, shot from the water.

I didn't quite hit the photo perspective just right - notably the white band in the modern photo is a concrete foundation of the building that is furthest to the right in the historical image, and suggests that I include more of the island in my modern perspective than the historic photo does.  Despite that, though, the differences in the perspectives are clear.  Unlike many light stations in the Salish Sea, most of the buildings that used to make up the light station are now gone.  

Turn Point Light Station

WWII era photo of the Turn Point light station, with a military observation tower in the left of the image.  Image from Wikimedia Commons

Turn Point on Stuart Island marks the ragged and liquid edge of the contiguous United States, and like many of the most northerly rocky points of the San Juan Islands, it is graced with a historic lighthouse that helped (and still helps, though now with an automated light) to guide ships along the channels between Canada and the United States.  And, like many of the historic light stations, it is in very good repair, such that if you were a visitor to this place from the turn of the century you might not immediately know that you had arrived in 2020.  Case in point, the image above is ~80 years old, and the scene today is different only in minor detail:

1 November 2020 photo of the Turn Point light station, looking north from the Keeper's house

The most notable difference is the observation tower at left in the photo, which was used as an observation post during WWII...another symbol of changing uses of Washington's shoreline.

Landing craft on the beach at Fort Worden

 A quick post today from Fort Worden in Port Townsend. I mostly want to use this post to amplify the great work by Fort Worden historian Tim Caldwell with his regular column in the Port Townsend Leader newspaper. Kudos to the newspaper and the community for continuing to celebrate and share the story of this special place. 

Tim shared this same historical photo of landing craft on the beach at Point Wilson earlier this year. Please enjoy Tim's history behind this photo at the Port Townsend Leader's website and enjoy my now photo here for comparison:

Point Wilson at Fort Worden Then (1950) and Now (2020)
(Historical photo courtesy of the Jefferson County Historical Society)

In the distance you see the Point Wilson lighthouse, which has stood since 1879, although it was rebuilt in 1914. It was built on a very sandy beach and the shoreline to the north was heavily armored in an effort to protect the lighthouse and associated buildings from the large wind waves from the Strait of Juan de Fuca that pummel the beach and threatened the integrity of these structures. The negative effects of shoreline armoring obviously weren't known in those days. 

Please visit this page from the National Archives to see photos of the previous lighthouse and the beach before the riprap was placed. For more information about the history of the lighthouse, please visit lighthousefriends.com, and for current information please visit pointwilsonlighthouse.org. 

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Flagler's guns come ashore at Marrowstone Point

My favorite place to visit here on the Olympic Peninsula is Fort Flagler on Marrowstone Island. The former coast artillery fort is now a state park offering the best views of Puget Sound you can hope to find, including powerful currents and marine wildlife to watch, historical military structures to explore, and let’s toss in a lighthouse (well, sort of) for good measure. All these features make it an endlessly entertaining place to visit for a day, a weekend, or longer.

The historical photo for today’s blog post really blew my mind when I first saw it. It's a shot of Marrowstone Point from 1898, when Fort Flagler was under construction. I hope you enjoy my now photo, but you really should go to Jefferson County Historical Society’s site and look at the original historical photo. There are so many fascinating details to spot. Those are enormous cannon barrels being brought ashore from a barge on the beach. And in the distance on the left is the Marrowstone Light Station keeper's residence.

Marrowstone Point at Fort Flagler in 1898 and 2020
(Historical photo courtesy of Jefferson County Historical Society) 

Construction of Fort Flagler began in 1897 but the U.S. government was active here a decade earlier in the interest of maritime safety. A light to guide mariners has shone at Marrowstone Point in one form or another since 1888, but not from the traditional lighthouse tower that most of us would think of. Starting with a lens lantern mounted on a pole, the light eventually was erected atop a 20 ft. concrete building where it has been located since 1918. 

The light keeper's residence in both our now and then photos has acted as sentinel, standing at the shoreline since 1896. Just offshore, Puget Sound's unwieldy winds and dense fog can make navigating the strong currents rushing through narrow Admiralty Inlet a harrowing experience for vessels of any size. One calamitous event happened here in 1892 when the freighter S.S. Willamette rammed the S.S. Premier at full speed, killing five and injuring 18. Although neither ship sank, the damage to the Premier was significant to say the least. Take a look for yourself.  😮

The light still shines, now automated, but since the mid-1970s the site and structures have primarily served federal scientific research as the U.S. Geological Survey’s Marrowstone Marine Field Station. Their current work is focused on fish and overall marine ecosystem health. The light keeper's residence provides lodging for visiting scientists.

Marrowstone Point 1895 map
(National Archives)

I have not been able to track down information on the barn or other buildings we see in the historical photo. But on a map of the fort from 1913, the buildings are labeled as “old stables” and “old laundry.” Structures also appear on a map from 1895, but have no information. If anyone knows more, please share.

Fort Flagler 1913 map
(National Archives)

In addition to these maps, the National Archives website has several interesting photos including the document below showing the earlier structure on which the light was placed, and the front of the keeper's quarters with its fog bell. Both structures still stand and can be seen today (minus the bell).

1915 images of Marrowstone Point Light Station
(National Archives)

Sources: 

• https://www.historylink.org/File/5702
  https://www.lighthousefriends.com/light.asp?ID=109
• "Fort Flagler, Over 100 years of History," A Friends of Fort Flagler publication, 3rd Edition, January 2013

Dungeness Spit: The Lighthouse, Part 1

Yesterday I wrapped up the last of three days of annual shoreline survey work on Dungeness Spit, which took me out to the lighthouse area.  The scene here is completely different than what you find on Ediz Hook, in the sense that visiting the lighthouse on Dungeness Spit is a lesson in constancy...at least over the historical period.  Here is what I mean.  This is a photo from the turn of the century (exact date unknown) of the lighthouse complex on the end of Dungeness Spit:

Turn of the century photograph of the New Dungeness Lighthouse, originally built in 1857.  Photo from the Bert Kellogg collection, hosted by the North Olympic Library System.  

Here is roughly the same view (I didn't get the perspective quite right), approximately 120 years later:

7 June 2020 photograph of the New Dungeness Lighthouse.

Its amazing to me how much is similar between these two photos.  I'm sure there is a long story behind how this amazing set of structures has been preserved, but my suspicion is that a lot of the credit probably goes to the New Dungeness Light Station Association, an organization dedicated to the maintenance of this place.  

There are, of course, some interesting differences that I didn't note until I had the chance to examine these photos carefully.  First off, the light tower itself is shorter...apparently due to a tower shortening project conducted in 1927 (see the history assembled here).  A few buildings are missing - a fog signal building and privy, for example, that are shown in the historic image above aren't in the modern view.  In the historic view you can also make out a tram on rails that ran to a dock, and was used for transporting supplies from off-loading ships to the lighthouse.  There is no trace of that tram in the modern photo above though you can find bits and pieces of it still scattered in the adjacent dunes:

4 August 2020 photo looking east from a point west of the New Dungeness Lighthouse, showing what I take to be pieces of an old tram used to move supplies between a dock and the lighthouse.

Ediz Hook Part Four: The Light House

I think this will be the last one for a bit on Ediz Hook...time to move on to other large spits!  But for number 4 I wanted to stick with the old stately lighthouse that used to grace the end of Ediz Hook...an area that has now evolved into a sort of storage lot for the USCG base that now takes up the end of the Hook.  Here is an 1890 photo of one of the first Ediz Hook lighthouse (there was another built in the early 1900's):

Ediz Hook lighthouse, 1890.  Photo from the Bert Kellogg collection, hosted by the North Olympic Library System

So this photo is a bit hard to place exactly, given that you can't make out any landmarks in the photo.  However, if my placement of the fog bell that I covered in this previous blog is correct, then this is roughly the modern perspective of the 1890 shot above:

9 June 2020 photo of Ediz Hook.  Photo by Ian Miller

Again, impressive changes to this impressive place on Washington's shoreline.  BTW this original Ediz Hook lighthouse (or perhaps one of the later buildings?) apparently still exists as a house in Port Angeles.  One of my earliest Coastnerd Gazette entries attempted to tell the story...

Ediz Hook Part Three: The Fog Bell

I'm just going to continue on with a focus on changes to Ediz Hook, and notably the beautiful old lighthouse facility that used to sit on its tip.  Part 1 and Part 2 are here and here.  Below is a 1907 view of the fog bell that once sat on the end of Ediz Hook:

1907 photo of fog bell on the end of Ediz Hook.  Photo from the Burt Kellogg collection, hosted by the North Olympic Library System.

This view is notable for a variety of reasons.  One, it was shot in winter, and there is snow on the ground.  Second, it appears that this was a manual bell...so during foggy weather, or presumably any time visibility was impaired, the light-keeper had to be working that bell.  Pretty astonishing.

I could find no trace of this building...no foundation, no indentation in the grass.  However, based on the outline of the mountains that are visible behind the building its evident that this photos was taken from roughly here, looking towards the south.  Here is the modern view, as close as I felt I could match it:

Photo collected 9 June 2020, Ediz Hook, by Ian Miller

The site of this fog bell building is important, as it is the only thing that provides any reference for a few other photos of the lighthouse complex that sat on Ediz Hook.  A post to follow will focus on one of those photos.