Sekiu and the schooner Louise

 This 1909 photo of the schooner Louise S. on its side in Sekiu is featured in an interpretive display about shipwrecks at Clallam Bay State Park, and I've always found it arresting.  

The schooner Louise S. aground just offshore of Sekiu, WA in 1909.  Photo from the Bert Kellogg collection.  

The ship itself provides a glimpse into a time period on the Olympic Peninsula when boats like this would have been a common sight sailing from coastal town to coastal town.  But the other thing, of course, that this photo features is in the background...the shoreline of Sekiu.  And just as the ship speaks to changes in our modes of transport, the shoreline in this 1909 photo speaks to changes in the shoreline.  Here is the modern view from more or less the same spot:

8 August 2021 photo of the boat haven in Sekiu, Washington, taken about here.

The changes here made it hard to orient the photo, but I tried to focus on the iconic Three Sisters (here is a closer-up historical view of them), which are barely visible in the modern photo, sticking out of a parking lot behind the boats.  The shoreline here has been filled and, obviously, a breakwater built to create the modern boat haven.  I can't find much online about the history of the breakwater, fill or the marina in general, so if anybody knows more please reach out.

The Irondale Steel Mill

 This one happened by accident...I happened to be down at the beautiful Irondale County Beach Park with my kids and just decided to poke around the Bert Kellogg collection for photos from Irondale.  I had no idea that this was the site of one of the first major industrial endeavors in Western Washington, the Irondale Iron and Steel Plant built in 1881.  This photo from sometime around the turn of the 20th century gives a sense for the scale of the site:

Turn of the century photo of the Irondale Iron and Steel Mill, taken from about here.  Photo from the Bert Kellogg collection.

The modern view (or as close to it as I could figure out how to get):

5 July 2021 photo taken here.

At low tide various pilings and cement footings are still visible on the beach here, presumably that were associated with the buildings and wharfs of the mill.  And while I didn't explore more of the site, it looks as if there might be a lot of history still visible in the trees if you poke around.  In the distance in both the historic and modern photo is Kala Point, with an apparently nearly identical copse of trees visible in both photos, and then behind that the shoreline of Port Townsend.  

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

The Twin "Mole"

Looking west in 2010 from about here on the Strait of Juan de Fuca.  Photo by Hugh Shipman 

This weekend I took advantage of the good low tides to trek out west for a walk on the fascinating shoreline near the West Twin River.  A notable feature on this shoreline used to be the "mole" that served a former clay mine that is currently owned by LaFarge North America, and which is the low, pier-like feature in Hugh Shipman's 2010 photo above.  This mole was indeed used as a wharf, to load barges of mine material when the mine was active.  In 2016 the company removed the mole as part of the requirements associated with their aquatic lands lease, and the Coastal Watershed Institute was contracted and designed a removal approach relying largely on natural erosion to re-distribute the fill material making up the core of the mole.  As a result Hugh Shipman's 2010 view looks quite a bit different:

1 May 2021 photo looking west at the former site of the LaFarge clay mine mole.

This is another example of a very short-term, restoration-driven change to the shoreline, similar to the Elwha restoration example posted here.  

Changing uses of the shoreline: The Coupeville wharf

 

A few weeks ago during a brief ice cream stop-over in Coupeville, Washington, I spent a few minutes appreciating the nice little wharf that is a central feature of town.  The wharf appears to be primarily given over to tourist use, and the building at the end features public restrooms, and a few small shops.  A quick bit of time online, though, revealed that this view I was enjoying was yet another prime example of the changing uses of Washington's shorelines that feature in previous posts.  In particular, I found this 1933 photo of the wharf on the Port of Coupeville website:

The wharf was built in 1905 and, not surprisingly, supported the transportation needs of a variety of industries for many decades.  In the photo above, for example, a grain tower is visible on the left side (photo perspective) of the building, to support the loading of grain, and the wharf also acted as a ferry landing until the Deception Pass Bridge was built in the 1930's.  It wasn't until the mid 1980's that the wharf slowly started to transition into something more like a tourist destination.  The Port of Coupeville's website also features a really nice history of this wharf, and its changing uses through time - nearly all of the information for this post came from that site.  

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