Port Gamble
| Port Gamble | |||
|---|---|---|---|
 Entrance to Port Gamble |
|||
| Location in Washington | |||
|
|||
| Basic data | |||
| Foundation : | 1853 | ||
| State : | United States | ||
| State : | Washington | ||
| County : | Kitsap County | ||
| Coordinates : | 47 ° 51 ′ N , 122 ° 35 ′ W | ||
| Time zone : | Pacific ( UTC − 8 / −7 ) | ||
| Residents : | 102 (status: 2000) | ||
| Population density : | 255 inhabitants per km 2 | ||
| Area : | 0.4 km 2 (approx. 0 mi 2 ) | ||
| Height : | 18 m | ||
| Postal code : | 98364 | ||
| GNIS ID : | 1512577 | ||
| Website : | www.portgamble.com | ||
 Port Gamble Church |
|||
Port Gamble is an unincorporated town in Kitsap County in the US state of Washington . The place is a company settlement and is eight kilometers northwest of Kingston on the Kitsap Peninsula on a bay of the same name at the entrance to the Hood Canal .
history
The bay of Port Gamble was called Teekalet in the language of the Indians , which is translated as light in the noon hour and supposedly refers to the light sandy beach. The Wilkes Expedition named the bay in 1841 after Robert Gamble , a US naval officer and war hero of the British-American War of 1812.
In 1853, William Talbot and Andrew Pope , two Maine entrepreneurs , built a sawmill in Port Gamble . The timber required was felled on the spot. The other wood to be processed was delivered via the Hood Canal and sold as construction timber for mining, houses or ships to San Francisco , where there was considerable demand due to the gold rush . The sawmill's general store was also open to local customers, which provided an additional source of income. The workers lived on the coast and near the sawmill in log houses, which should also offer protection from feared Indian attacks.
Battle of Port Gamble
In fact, in November 1856 there was a skirmish between the US warship USS Massachusetts and a group of Tlingit who had set off on a raid in seven large war canoes from Kupreanof Island and the area around Stikine in what was then Russia's southern Alaska. After raids on the Steilacoom Indian settlements , the Tlingit rowed to the beach at Port Gamble, where their relatives worked in the sawmill. The captain of the warship ordered a landing force to inform the Indians that they were to leave Puget Sound by towing the steamer . The request was refused and the warship opened fire. In the skirmish that followed, 27 Indians were killed and 21 wounded, including a chief who later succumbed to his wounds. Only one sailor of the warship was killed. The sailors burned all but one of the Indian canoes and took the 87 survivors prisoner. The Massachusetts brought them to Victoria , but the British Governor James Douglas forbade the Indians to go ashore because their homeland was beyond his jurisdiction. The Massachusetts captain bought them new canoes, hauled them as far as Nanaimo and sent them back home with provisions for 15 days, not without warning them of a new venture into the Puget Sound area. In the coming year, however, there was a vengeance by the Indians, who landed on Whidbey Island in retaliation for the death of their chief and murdered Colonel Isaac Ebey . Fort Townsend was built to protect against further attacks .
Growth in the 19th century
In 1858 the Port Gamble sawmills had 175 workers. Although many entrepreneurs came from New England , especially from Maine, there were also many Indians who lived in a settlement called Little Boston on the opposite bank of the Hood Canal (Hardy Green, p. 42). The company Pope & Talbot cleared the area of the hills above the sawmill for a new settlement, which was built in the style of the New England villages, where the company founders and many of the workers came from, with wooden houses with shingle gables and wooden fences around the gardens. Unmarried workers lived in a communal house and ate in a common dining room; the company built a school for the families of the workers in addition to the general store and in 1879 a church based on the church in East Machias , the hometown of Pope and Talbot. Since Port Gamble was a company settlement, the architectural style changed only slowly, the Puget Mill Company kept to a modified New England style for new buildings.
In 1875, the Puget Mill Company, which emerged from Pope & Talbot, owned the largest logging forest in the Washington Territory . In 1877 she acquired the Utsalay Mill on Camano Island and in 1878 the sawmill in Port Ludlow . After the death of Pope in 1878 and that of Talbot in 1881, the general manager Cyrus Walker continued to run the company. The gold rush in Alaska created further demand for wood from Port Gamble from 1896, which was also sold as far as England, Australia and Peru. Cyrus Walker died in 1913.
Port Gamble in the 20th century
In 1925 the Puget Mill Company was sold to the McCormick Lumber Company of Delaware . The company expanded the sawmill considerably, but the Great Depression saw demand for wood fall to its lowest level since 1904 in 1932. In 1935 the sawmill in Port Gamble was shut down, and in 1938 McCormick Lumber had to declare bankruptcy. Pope & Talbot repurchased Port Gamble and continued to operate the sawmill. At that time, the settlement was at its greatest with 160 buildings. In the mid-1960s, Pope & Talbot recognized the historic value of Port Gamble, restored 30 buildings and reinstalled historic gas lantern lighting. In November 1966, Port Gamble was listed as a Historic District on the National Register of Historic Places and recognized as a National Historic Landmark . 85 buildings have been preserved and offer an insight into an architecture that was popular in the region for 60 years. The oldest house, Thompson House , was built in 1859, the newest is the garage and gas station from 1920. Except for the fire station and Masonic Lodge , all buildings are in their original locations. The sawmill was last in operation on November 30, 1995, at the time it was the longest-running sawmill in North America.
Even after the sawmill was closed and demolished, the town was owned by a subsidiary of Pope & Talbot. The buildings have been renovated and rented, the church is a popular wedding venue, and art markets, civil war re-enactments and other events take place in the green spaces around the settlement . A museum on the history and technology of the sawmill is located on the ground floor of the General Store. The Buena Vista Cemetery houses the graves of 115 people from ten countries, including the grave of Gustav Englebrecht , of German descent , who died in the battle of 1856 and is therefore the first member of the US Navy to be killed in the northwestern Pacific. The cemetery is on a hill with a panoramic view of Puget Sound.
North of the city at the northern end of the Kitsap Peninsula is the Port Gamble S'Klallam Reservation . The S'Klallam tribe includes over 1,100 Indians, around half of whom live in the reservation.
literature
- Ruth Kirk and Carmela Alexander: Exploring Washington's Past: A Road Guide to History. Seattle, 1995: University of Washington Press, ISBN 978-0-295-97443-9 , p. 375
- Doug Brokenshire: Washington Place Names: from Alki to Yelm. Caldwell, Idaho, 1993: Caxton. ISBN 978-0-870043567 , p. 168
Web links
- Internet presence of the place
- Port Gamble on historylink.org
- Port Gamble on Kitsap County's tourism website
- Port Gamble in the United States Geological Survey's Geographic Names Information System
Individual evidence
- ↑ Hardy Green: The Company Towns: the industrial Edens and satanic mills that shaped the American Economy. New York, 2010: Basic Books, ISBN 978-0-46501826-0 , p. 42
-
↑ Port Gamble Historic District on the National Register of Historic Places , accessed March 10, 2020.
Listing of National Historic Landmarks by State: Washington. National Park Service , accessed March 10, 2020. - ↑ Historylink.org: Haida raiders kill Gustave Englebrecht first, US Navy battle death in the Pacific, at Port Gamble on November 21, 1856. Accessed December 7, 2011 .