Topic: Islands
In 1909, the island residents of San Juan County in Northwest Washington relied on their two newspapers, the San Juan Islander and the Friday Harbor Journal, to keep them apprised not only of local, r...
The southernmost island in Puget Sound, Anderson Island has forged its identity in the background of its better-known neighbor, McNeil. It comprises 7.75 square miles, with about 14 miles of convolute...
Eagle Harbor lies on the eastern side of Bainbridge Island, which is located in central Puget Sound directly west of Seattle. Until 1990 the community situated on the harbor was named Winslow. In 1990...
Blake Island, a 476-acre Washington State Park, lies in Puget Sound approximately eight miles from downtown Seattle. It is located in east central Kitsap County, four miles off Alki Point, between the...
Lucinda Stewart Boyce was not only the first Euro-American woman to live permanently on San Juan Island, she also served as a community leader and role model for hundreds of women who braved the primi...
Stephen Boyce moved to San Juan Island in 1860 and, over the next half-century, farmed there, raised a large family, and became a much-respected pioneer settler and community leader. As a youngster in...
In the late nineteenth century a few Chinese immigrants found work in the San Juan Islands in domestic service, on farms, or in mining and logging camps, but most Chinese laborers came to the islands ...
Coupeville is one of Washington's oldest towns and the seat of Island County. Situated on Whidbey Island, at Penn Cove on Saratoga Passage, the town was once the site of three permanent Lower Skagit t...
Establishing a water system for the residents of Friday Harbor on San Juan Island was a topic of discussion as soon as the town was incorporated in 1909, but it took five years to complete a system. S...
No region of Washington was spared the crippling effects of the Great Depression that overshadowed the country in the 1930s, but the residents of San Juan County in Northwest Washington had some advan...
From the earliest days of non-Native settlement on San Juan Island (located in the Salish Sea between the Washington mainland and Vancouver Island) assuring that pioneer children received at least a b...
Roy Franklin was a legendary island bush pilot and the primary founder of commercial aviation in the San Juan Islands, the archipelago located in Northwest Washington between the mainland and Canada's...
Friday Harbor is the seat of San Juan County and the county's only incorporated town. Its population in 2010 was 2,260 residents living on 1.01 square miles (685 acres) of land on central San Juan Isl...
For more than 65 years "Friday Harbor in a Nut-shell," a much-loved column in the local weekly newspaper, recorded just about everything anyone would want to know about life on San Juan Island in the ...
The waterfront of Friday Harbor, now the county seat and only incorporated town in San Juan County, has served as a sheltered access to San Juan Island from the early days of human occupation of the a...
Many histories of the San Juan Islands and of Friday Harbor, the town on San Juan Island that is the county seat of San Juan County, report that the protected bay known as Friday Harbor (from which th...
Generations of residents of Friday Harbor, the county seat of San Juan County in Northwest Washington, have had vivid memories of Virgil W. Frits, editor and publisher of the Friday Harbor Journal fro...
James Theodore Geoghegan (pronounced "Gay-g'n") was Orcas Island's most prolific photographer during the first half of the twentieth century. Much of what we know visually about Orcas, the largest of ...
Rebecca Smith, a 9th Grader at Canyon Park Junior High School, won First Prize in the 2006 Washington State History Day competition for Senior Historical Papers with this discussion of the San Juan Is...
Island County, the eighth oldest county in Washington, was created on January 6, 1853, by the Oregon Territorial Legislature from a portion of Thurston County and was named for the myriad of islands i...
A few Japanese immigrants arrived in the San Juan Islands late in the nineteenth century to work in fish canneries; seasonal employment was arranged by Seattle labor contractors and not until 1917 did...
Jetty Island is a man-made island located in Everett Harbor (Snohomish County) approximately one-quarter mile from the mainland. First built in the mid-1890s, the island was originally a jetty that ex...
John Luther Murray (1859-1949), a longtime resident of Friday Harbor on San Juan Island in Northwest Washington, served as auditor and treasurer of San Juan County, as a state legislator, and as mayor...
June (1893-1969) and Farrar (1888-1974) Burn, newly married in 1919 and searching for adventure and the best place to start their lives together, consulted an atlas and decided that the San Juan Islan...