English Camp Blockhouse and shoreline

The Blockhouse at English Camp on San Juan Island.  Photo collected 2 December 2020

I first visited English Camp in the early 1990's as a college student on a spring break bike trip.  I was as struck then as I am now by what is known as the Blockhouse, sitting on the wet marshy edge of  Garrison Bay.  This building dates to the 1860's and is notable both for its design and location, which strikes as me as fairly unique for the Pacific Northwest, and also for its relatively good state of repair given its location in the upper intertidal.  If you pulled up to this shoreline around 1915 you would have been greeted by a very similar view of the Blockhouse:

Photo of the Blockhouse, circa 1915.  Photo from the University of Washington Special Collection.

The building is treated well now, as it is managed by the National Park Service, but it is astonishing that it survived through many decades of private ownership between when the English departed in 1876, and when the NPS took over the management of this site in the 20th century.  The 1915 photo above was taken after at least 30 years of the site and buildings being used as a homestead and farm, with the waters of Garrison Bay lapping at the base of the structure the whole time.  

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.  

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