Everett Archives: The Port of Everett
Photo courtesy of the Port of Everett.
In the beginning the waterfront in Everett, Washington was open to anybody. Port Gardner was all beach access, all the time.
Early photos of the city show young kids bathing or lounging on rocks in swimwear. A group of children under the watch of women in hats sit on a grassy, sandy shore in front of the Everett Bread Factory. A group of young men pose on the roots of a giant tree washed ashore, their bicycles leaned against the trunk of the enormous driftwood structure.
For millennia before this, tribes of the Coast Salish fished the shores of Port Gardner Bay and built a longhouse on the bluff peak, where Legion Memorial Park is today.
Then, in the Twentieth Century, privatization and industry changed the shoreline of the young mill town.
In 1918 the citizens of Everett voted to form a port authority.* World War I was raging and the people wanted to attract naval shipyards to the peninsula's shores.
Shortly after the Port of Everett was established, the Great War ended. The waterfront to the west of the city quickly filled with industry centered around the number one regional export -- lumber. The hills, valleys, and mountains of Snohomish County were full of timber that was waiting to be felled and milled into shingles. And so the mill town waterfront rang out with the sounds of saws, bellowing work whistles, and clanking boxcars.
Photos from the 1920s show flotillas of logs bobbing in the bay, awaiting the jagged teeth and assembly lines of the mills. Many of the shingles were exported to China and Japan, especially after a major Japanese earthquake struck in the early 1920s.
The waterfront again changed in 1942 when the Everett-Pacific Shipbuilding & Dry Dock Company began building ships for World War II.
As the mills and canneries began to shutter due to exhausted natural resources, recreation again started to come back to the waterfront. For years, an average Everett resident could rent a rowboat from a local merchant and row into Port Gardner Bay for a day of fishing or taking in the views from the inland sea.
The annual Coho Derby brought out hundreds of sportspeople to try their hand at catching salmon.
Favorite destinations for citizens were Jetty Island and Hat Island. According to one account, many families rowed to Hat Island to pick out and cut down Christmas trees. Families also rowed to Jetty Island on weekends or evenings for picnics.
With the arrival of the Boeing airplane plant to Everett in the 1960s, the Port began importing parts for Boeing planes. The deepwater port was able to accommodate the large vessels needed to transfer aviation components. The airplane pieces were loaded onto rail cars and were transported down the coast to the Boeing Factory.
In the late 1980s, the Port sold a section of the Everett waterfront to the Navy.
In the late 2000s a series of ambitious new developments transformed the north end of the Port, near the marina. An organic cocktail bar, a craft brewpub, and a luxury hotel came to town, attracting new waves of visitors to the Everett waterfront.
The Sea is Who We Are
So much of the current structure of the shores of Port Gardner has been augmented and redesigned by man’s technological innovation.
Jetty Island consists of riprap and sand dredged from the Snohomish River. All of the land to the west of the giant bluff is made from backfill.
But the prioritization of commerce has come at a cost. The mills of the Twentieth Century weren’t what we’d now call environmentally friendly.
The shores of Everett have seen so many things: natural beach, canneries, mills, a Naval shipyard, and, finally, an upscale hotel with a fancy bistro.
All along the way, the port has mirrored the values of the people who live on this peninsula, and what they think of the waterfront at their doorstep.
The sea is who we are. How will we steward our seaside residence for future generations?
*It’s worth mentioning that there’s the port of Everett, which is the body of water and surrounding shores. There’s also the Port of Everett (capital P) which is the organization, paid for by local taxes, that manages the waterfront and the industry and development contained therein. It’s an important distinction, even though it’s the difference of one capital letter.
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