Port Townsend

Driving back to Seattle from Olympic National Park, my girlfriend and I took a detour for dinner to a café we’d found on Google Maps in a small town called Port Townsend.

The route in took us through a normal suburban neighborhood, where we were surprised to pass by a large, majestic stone building. It didn’t look religious; it looked like an old school or a library. It wasn’t until we passed by that we saw the sign above the door: UNITED STATES POST OFFICE. Fanciest post office I ever saw.

As we neared the restaurant, we entered what I can only describe as a historic docks district from cities like Boston and San Francisco. Lots of red brick buildings three and four stories high, built right next to each other, or separated by narrow alleys. To suddenly go from a small residential suburb to a dense historic city block was jarring!

Finally over dinner we looked up where exactly we’d found ourselves. If you imagine, for a moment, a correspondence between the San Francisco Bay and Puget Sound, then Port Townsend is right where San Francisco is, or originally was: on the inner lip of the south side of the straight that opens to the bay. It’s the natural place to put a city once you’ve discovered a large harbor that will obviously one day support a ton of commercial shipping. 

So at the turn of the century, Port Townsend was poised to become THE big city in Washington, the major port city for the state. Capital poured in: docks and buildings were built; a Rothschild built a (rather humble) home on a hill; many Victorian mansions were built; and, yes, they invested in a grand stone post office in a long-sighted investment to support the future city.  The final piece of the puzzle was a railroad line being constructed to connect Port Townsend to the rest of the United States across the Great Plains was under construction. 

Then the Great Depression hit. Capital packed up and left. The Rothschilds abandoned their house. Work on the railroad stopped, never to resume—

They only got as far as the small town of Seattle.