Everett Archives: We Cover the Waterfront
Header image courtesy of EPLS NW History Room archives.
For so many years, Everett was a city defined by its tugboats, steamers, whaleback ships, container boats, skiffs, and trawlers. The docks were covered in stevedores dodging crab pots while the leisure class sipped martinis at the Everett Yacht Club which was located inside an old steam wheeler called The Black Prince.
Today, we cover a few aspects of the Everett waterfront, to look at the salty history of this city by the sea.
Slimehouses
Imagine you get a job on the waterfront. You’re a fish processor at a canning plant, built on a long pier that sticks out into Possession Sound. Your job is to stand at a counter and clean salmon all day, paring away the flesh and bone with a serrated knife. You wear a rubber apron and rubber boots and every few minutes a chute opens up and water spills across the tops of your boots, washing away gutted fish entrails.
Such was life in the “slimehouses” or canning factories of Everett. These jobs were mostly worked by young women, whereas the actual job of canning the fish typically went to men. Life in the slimehouses wasn’t as bad as you might think, at least by the accounts that I read. The young women enjoyed finding time to gossip over the processing counters and if they finished their work early they hung out the windows of the factory to wave their handkerchiefs at young sailors.
The Public Waterfront
Much of the Everett waterfront was accessible by the public. This made for a lot of swimming spots. Early photos of Everett show groups of people in Sunday clothes picnicking on the shores of Possession Sound, the hills and bluffs of the city rising in the background.
One of my favorite photos of early Everett shows a group of young men in bowler hats. They’re sitting on top of a large tree that has washed ashore. At their feet are a half-dozen bicycles propped against the enormous piece of driftwood. This photo strikes a chord with me because I still like to ride my bike to the Everett waterfront: apparently, this is an old impulse!
Until the 1950s, anyone could rent boats on the Everett docks. “Fisherman” is a commonly-listed vocation in the city’s Polks Directories. The city hosted annual salmon fishing derbies with prizes.
Morris Boats
In the 1950s, a couple of brothers began a boatbuilding company on the 14th Street Pier. The Morris Boat Company built handcrafted “kicker” boats -- so-called because their outboard motors had some real kick to them.
Morris boats were in production until the 1990s. They were popular in water recreation circles and helped to kick off a powerboating craze in the middle of the twentieth century.
Today, Morris boats are highly prized by collectors of vintage watercraft for their durability and sleek design.
Morris Boats // EPLS NW History Room archives.
Other Stops on the Waterfront Tour
Let’s imagine we’re driving down Marine View Drive one hundred years ago. Here’s what else you might see.
The place where Boxcar Park is today? That was a mill. And the mill was connected to the railroad by a series of tracks. That’s where the “Boxcar” in Boxcar Park comes from.
Moving along, we see a bread factory and we also see a coffin factory. There’s a great advantage for producing goods directly on a deepwater port: it makes for easy shipping and receiving of products.
That’s the Everett waterfront, as it was. Today, it looks much different. The area has been transformed by the Port of Everett, hotels and cranes, domes filled with aluminum flakes, and the Navy yards. But the romance of the sea is still there. It draws people in droves on a sunny day to Boxcar Park. It brings families to Jetty Island (which also has a remarkable history).
The sea is our common heritage and it is all around us on this magical peninsula.
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