Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
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July/august 1990 | Volume 41, Issue 5
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
July/august 1990 | Volume 41, Issue 5
Port Townsend, Washington, is a place that residents would prefer to keep to themselves, a tranquil Victorian seaport on the Olympic Peninsula overlooking the Juan de Fuca Strait and Puget Sound. On a clear day the snow-covered peaks of the Cascade and Olympic mountains are visible in the distance, and almost every house in the center of town seems to have a view. Water Street, Port Townsend’s main commercial thoroughfare, runs along the bay. Lining the street are handsome cast-iron buildings whose jutting cornices and narrow arched windows make them seem taller than their three or four stories. Behind Water Street is one more avenue of shops, and then a bluff rises sharply, separating the downtown from the residential district. A steep flight of steps leads up the bluff to a tidy neighborhood of two- and three-story houses, some modest, some with towers and turrets, nearly all built between 1870 and 1900. What preserved all this Victoriana until the present day was not civic enlightenment but simple poverty. Port Townsend was born, flourished, and declined all within a few short decades, and when ruin came, it was complete. To judge by photographs published in an excellent local history, Port Townsend: Years That Are Gone (Quimper Press, $9.95), old houses weren’t repainted, much less remodeled or torn down to make room for new ones. Spared any drive for urban renewal, Port Townsend survived almost unchanged until the late 1950s, when new settlers began buying up buildings and restoring them. More noteworthy individual examples of Victorian architecture exist, but it is rare to find intact an entire community of residential and commercial buildings. In 1976 the heart of town was designated a National Historic District. A walk to the end of Water Street past the marina will take you to Point Hudson, a grassy bank where Klallam Indians were camped when the British explorer George Vancouver sailed up the strait in 1792. He named the site for his friend the Marquess of Townshend, who had fought with Wolfe at Quebec in 1759. (The h was later dropped.) No settlers arrived until the 185Os, and when they did, they were Americans, all territory south of the forty-ninth parallel having been ceded to the United States by treaty in 1846. Indians and whites coexisted side by side long enough for the Indians to be well documented by local photographers. A black high-prowed dugout canoe—some twenty-six feet long—serves as a monument to the Indian encampment on Point Hudson. It looks something like a Venetian gondola, and fleets of them once fished and traded off the point. By the early 1900s the Indians had been pretty well displaced to reservations. Today the land they occupied is a trailer park, which seems fitting somehow; trailers are the nomadic tents of our own era. Standing on Point Hudson, you’re only ninety miles