Ballard Boat Works 1905 and Present

Sivert Engelsen Sagstad, a young Norwegian boat builder emigrated to Seattle and opened Ballard Boat Works, pictured here on lower Salmon Bay, pre-Locks in 1905.

I paddle past this shoreline weekly and have been trying to look for any early evidence of his boatyard and as well as any Shilshole tribal evidence which was prevalent along the shoreline prior to the boatyard.

When the Ballard Locks were being developed some of the shoreline below the boatyard was removed. In the 1905 mage, note that the shoreline had a gentle slope to the water.  In the Now images, the shoreline is shorter and abruptly drops to the water. 

Read more about Sagstad and the 70' Viking ship replica in this article from HistoryLink..  Read the HistoryLink story 

Ballard Boat Works in 1905 and 'Now' view from Seaview Picnic Park

'Now' view from Seaview Picnic Park (location of yellow arrow)

2020 view of approx Ballard Boat Works location.  Photo: Salmon Bay Paddle

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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.

Ruby Beach, Olympic National Park

Complementing last week's post about Ozette village, lets stay out on the coast for a bit.  Back in June the Forks Forum published a historic photo of Ruby Beach that dates, I think, to the 1930's.  Here it is:

Photograph of Ruby Beach, probably from the 1930's.  Unknown source, but published by the Forks Forum on their Facebook page on June 18.  

This photo really blew me away, as I had no idea that this site, which is now a very popular hike-in day use area along Olympic National Park's coastal strip, was used in this way.  The site is striking, in part because of the very prominent sea stacks and promontories visible in the background of this photo...which also make the modern perspective very easy to recreate.  A few weeks ago I did just that after a visit to Kalaloch to do some field data collection.  Here is the modern view:

Photograph of Ruby Beach, 26 June 2020.

If you look closely at these two photos you can also note some very minor, but obvious, landscape changes along the bank of Cedar Creek in the near field, and to the sea stacks in the far field.   Rocky stacks along Washington's coast seem permanent, but are continually changing and eroding...a process that we typically can't "see" unless we have the chance to view the changes over long time-spans, like the roughly 80-90 intervening years between these two photos.

Ozette...another (not) "lost" community

A few weeks ago I posted about Port Crescent, calling it a "Lost City".  There are a number of places along Washington's coast that people used to call home, but now don't.  Many of those places, like Port Crescent, were abandoned due to economic or demographic forces.  Some, like Ozette, were abandoned for different reasons: according to sources I've spoken to within the tribe, the residents of Ozette were more or less required to leave when their children were required to attend school, but no school was provided to the village.  People had to leave. But its definitely a misnomer to call Ozette "lost"...it is very much alive in the hearts of many and clearly not truly lost.

Ozette was one of the five main village sites of the Makah, and in the 1890's the site was heavily developed:

1890's photo of residences at Ozette.  Photo courtesy of the Burt Kellogg collection, hosted by the North Olympic Library.  

The site is now on a small sliver of the Makah Tribe's reservation, surrounded on all sides by the extraordinary wilderness coastal strip of Olympic National Park.  Here is today's view:

29 June 2020 photo of Ozette.  The building in the foreground is an abandoned National Park Service building.

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.

Ediz Hook Part Two - From the Other End

Every year I try to make it out the the end of Ediz Hook to collect survey data to add to a multi-year monitoring study of beaches in Washington State.  Since the whole of the end of the Hook is part of a US Coast Guard base, its not just a simple matter of driving out there...it takes a bit of set up.  But its always fun and interesting.  My trip out there this year was last week, and I figured it also offered a stellar opportunity to provide some perspective on changes to the Hook to complement my earlier post on Ediz Hook.  Notably, the end of Ediz Hook used to host a lighthouse, built in 1865 and subsequently modified a few times.  For this post I want to focus on this photo, dated to the 1880's and presumably shot from the lighthouse tower, looking landward along the Hook:

Photo taken in the 1880's looking landward along Ediz Hook.  From the Burt Kellogg collection, hosted by the North Olympic Library System.  

There really isn't much trace of the lighthouse or its associated buildings out at the end of Ediz Hook anymore, but there are a few more modern storage buildings...and one of them has a flight of stairs that allowed me to get up pretty close to where this photo was shot ~140 years ago.  Here is what the view looks like now:

Photo by Ian Miller, collected 9 June 2020

Ediz Hook is so heavily modified...you have to really use your imagination to get a sense for what an amazing habitat it must have been.  I would love to be able to go back to when the 1880's photo above was shot and take a look around.