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    Orcas Island
    Orcas Island
    Orcas Island
    Ebook172 pages1 hour

    Orcas Island

    By Orcas Island Historical Society and Museum

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    About this ebook

    Orcas Island, the largest of the 172 islands in San Juan County, lies in the Salish Sea north of Puget Sound. Known as the "Gem of the San Juans" for her shimmering emerald hills bounded by 125 miles of rocky, tree-lined shore, Orcas was home to countless generations of Native Americans before the arrival of its first white settlers, formerly Hudson's Bay men who had hunted on the island, in the late 1850s. An international boundary dispute, popularly known as the Pig War, prevented early pioneers from settling land claims until the dispute was resolved by the German kaiser in 1872. Settlement grew slowly until improved steamship routes and increased commerce brought more tourists to the island. In 1906, Robert Moran built a fabulous estate, Rosario, now a world-class resort. Thousands of visitors have been coming to Orcas Island over the years to explore her forested hills, camp in Moran State Park or stay at one of the many historic resorts, and fish in the pristine waters surrounding this island paradise.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateSep 18, 2012
    ISBN9781439631058
    Orcas Island
    Author

    Orcas Island Historical Society and Museum

    In this new volume, the Orcas Island Historical Society and Museum presents a selection of the vintage images culled from its extensive archive and accompanied by an engaging narrative to tell the story of this unique place. Housed in historic homestead cabins, the museum preserves and displays images and artifacts of the Northern Straits Salish people, as well as early European-American settlers in the region.

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    • 4/5
      It has been many years since I have been to Orcas Island, and this book makes me want to go back for a visit.

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    Orcas Island - Orcas Island Historical Society and Museum

    Washington.

    INTRODUCTION

    Orcas Island lies in the Salish Sea, north of Puget Sound, midway between the Washington mainland and Vancouver Island, Canada. The largest of the 172 islands in San Juan County, Washington, the unique shape of Orcas Island contains 57 square miles of hilly, forested land bounded within 125 miles of mostly rocky shoreline. Home to the Northern Straits Salish, including the Lummi, Samish, Saanich, Semiahmoo, and Songhee tribes, Orcas Island was populated by First Peoples for countless generations before its discovery by white men in the late 18th century. Orcas Island provided its original inhabitants with a bountiful larder of food from sea and land in a sheltered, protected environment.

    Spanish explorers named Orcas Island in honor of the viceroy of Mexico, a gentleman with 13 names, one of which was Orcasitees. Capt. George Vancouver, on his epic voyage of discovery in 1792, sailed along the eastern shore of Orcas Island. Charles Wilkes, commanding the United States exploring expedition in 1839–1842, mapped the islands and waters surrounding Orcas Island and named Mount Constitution, at 2,409 feet, the highest point in the county. The first white settlers on Orcas Island were two men originally sent by the Hudson’s Bay Company at Fort Victoria on Vancouver Island, to hunt deer on the island. Liking what they saw as they hiked and hunted over the island, the two men left the Hudson’s Bay Company employ, built cabins, and settled on Orcas Island.

    Settlement grew slowly for many reasons, chief among them a boundary dispute with Great Britain that questioned sovereignty over the islands and caused great hardship to homesteaders unable to prove up, or patent, their claims. Miners traveling from California to new goldfields in Canada and Alaska passed through the islands and some stayed behind to settle on the island. Recalling the mild climate and pristine forests of the island and remembering the waters teeming with salmon, others returned from their gold rush adventures to settle on homestead claims. New white settlers lived harmoniously with the First Peoples, and many married native women and started families.

    The decades following the Civil War saw increased settlement on Orcas Island. Olga, Deer Harbor, West Sound, Newhall, and Eastsound, at widely scattered points around the island, became the first population centers. Built around docks and early post offices, the small, isolated settlements slowly added schools and small businesses to the crude log cabins and rustic frame buildings housing the workers and their families. As the government authorized new post offices, mail routes arose that required a certain frequency and dependability; these, in turn, stimulated trade in both passengers and freight, and the islands established commerce with mainland points.

    Commercial activity was slow to come to Orcas Island, owing to the difficulty of transport, the sparse and scattered population, the low level of economic activity centered for the most part on trade and barter, and the unsettled frontier. The Langdon Lime Kiln was the first commercial enterprise on Orcas Island, and other limekilns were soon constructed to take advantage of the limestone outcroppings found at different locations on the island. The limekilns produced lime for building and construction by heating the rock over wood fires, which consumed vast quantities of wood. Fish traps, built atop known salmon migration routes, netted millions of fish, and canneries were built nearby to process the salmon for shipment to distant markets. Sawmills were built to provide box and barrel stock to pack the lime and fish, finished lumber for houses and buildings, and timbers for construction of docks, piers, and fish traps. Andrew Newhall bought the steamer Buckeye, secured a mail route contract and a post office for the community at Newhall, and began providing competition to the existing steamship monopoly.

    Steamships began stopping at the small, remote settlements around Orcas Island with increasing frequency on the various mail runs to the island. Commercial traffic grew as powdered lime from the limekilns, fruit, wool, and salmon were shipped to mainland markets. A large fruit-growing business started near Eastsound and other islanders soon joined in planting orchards of various types, settling eventually on Italian prunes as the commercial crop best suited to the island soil and climate. Other common crops included apples, pears, strawberries, rhubarb, peaches, apricots, and cherries. By the late 1890s, Eastsound resembled an orchard more than a community, with rows of fruit trees planted wherever the settlers could find space to put them.

    Passenger traffic increased through the last decades of the 19th century, with excursions from Seattle and other cities growing in popularity. The East Sound Inn, Our House, and other small hotels began providing facilities for visitors, and a few small resorts arose at scattered locations, providing tent camping facilities for vacationers who wanted to stay on the island. In the 1890s, it wasn’t unusual to see several hundred people disembark from excursion steamships at the Eastsound docks on a Sunday morning and scatter over the island for hours of hiking, sightseeing, and beachcombing.

    Boom and bust economic cycles affected Orcas Island as they did everyone else, but the effects were eased by the mild climate, ready supply of timber for firewood and building, plentiful bounty of salmon and other seafood near at hand, and the ability of islanders to grow just about anything they desired. The Orcas Island fruit business stimulated steamship traffic, with voluminous shipments of prunes, apples, and other fruit requiring three daily steamship sailings from Eastsound. More than 160,000 boxes of apples were shipped from Eastsound docks in 1895, and thousands of barrels of Italian prunes were shipped fresh by rail as far east as Omaha, Nebraska.

    The Orcas Island fruit business was in precipitous decline by 1915, due in part to the improved methods of irrigation and better proximity to rail of the orchards in eastern Washington. As the orchards fell into disuse, however, the resort and tourism business began to increase as more people on the mainland

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