Published: Monday, March 2, 2009
Everett port looks to its past
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Port of Everett Photo A look at the Everett waterfront. Once dubbed the City of Smokestacks, Everett was a planned community based on its deepwater port and its proximity to logs that could be turned into shingles, ships and a variety of other wood products.
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Port of Everett Photo
A large dock to host cargo ships from around the world and an adjacent one to load and unload items once jutted out from the Everett waterfront.
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Train cars full of Volkswagen beetles were among cargo shipped to the Port of Everett through the years.
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You hear a lot of talk about planned developments.
Mill Creek was a planned residential development. So was Harbour Pointe. Several have been talked about recently in areas such as Lake Goodwin.
But such developments are nothing new. That's how Everett came to be in the early 1890s when a Tacoma industrialist named Henry Hewitt looked at the Port Gardner peninsula and envisioned a planned city with diversified industries.
The business center that ultimately filled the city's waterfront started out with four: a nail works, a shipyard, a smelter and a pulp-and-paper mill.
Everett historians Larry and Jack O'Donnell have written all about them and about the businesses that followed in what the Port of Everett calls its north marina area in a port-commissioned document intended to be used in displays of the area's history.
The port's three commissioners will be thinking about that history and a future series of displays at their Tuesday meeting when they consider approving an interpretive program that could cost $400,000 over the next five years.
The commission had earlier planned to do much less to meet a fall deadline it had in an agreement with three historical groups, but the groups all supported the bigger project over a longer period.
Among the things that have already been discussed are a statue with historic displays to support Everett's fishing industry that would be paid for by a private tribute committee and displays in a new port administration building planned along the waterfront.
"That would be a good spot for it," said Lisa Lefeber of the port.
If the program is approved by the commission Tuesday, the next step is the selection of a design firm to work with the port and the historic groups to create a master plan for the historic displays, which would be placed in several areas as the port pursues a $400 million planned redevelopment of the north marina area.
Whatever plan is approved, the O'Donnells' report will be a big part of it.
Lefeber said it's the most complete look at the area's history that she's seen. The report is in draft form now, but she said that photos will be added and a more complete document will be available on the port's Web site later this year.
"We'd like to develop a booklet that we could give to the school district as a teaching tool," she added.
The O'Donnells' report looks at how the area started with a few dozen residents in 1890 and sprouted to several thousand by the end of 1892. Just as quickly, the community's boomtown days ended in late 1893 as the country was gripped by a sever depression and industrialist John D. Rockefeller extracted his investment in Everett.
The report continues with Everett's ebbs and flows as businesses and the people who backed them came and went.
The study also looks at events like the Everett Massacre, in which seven people were killed and many others were wounded on the City Dock during a 1916 shootout between the sheriff and his deputies and members of the Industrial Workers of the World, also known as the Wobblies.
Mill Creek was a planned residential development. So was Harbour Pointe. Several have been talked about recently in areas such as Lake Goodwin.
But such developments are nothing new. That's how Everett came to be in the early 1890s when a Tacoma industrialist named Henry Hewitt looked at the Port Gardner peninsula and envisioned a planned city with diversified industries.
The business center that ultimately filled the city's waterfront started out with four: a nail works, a shipyard, a smelter and a pulp-and-paper mill.
Everett historians Larry and Jack O'Donnell have written all about them and about the businesses that followed in what the Port of Everett calls its north marina area in a port-commissioned document intended to be used in displays of the area's history.
The port's three commissioners will be thinking about that history and a future series of displays at their Tuesday meeting when they consider approving an interpretive program that could cost $400,000 over the next five years.
The commission had earlier planned to do much less to meet a fall deadline it had in an agreement with three historical groups, but the groups all supported the bigger project over a longer period.
Among the things that have already been discussed are a statue with historic displays to support Everett's fishing industry that would be paid for by a private tribute committee and displays in a new port administration building planned along the waterfront.
"That would be a good spot for it," said Lisa Lefeber of the port.
If the program is approved by the commission Tuesday, the next step is the selection of a design firm to work with the port and the historic groups to create a master plan for the historic displays, which would be placed in several areas as the port pursues a $400 million planned redevelopment of the north marina area.
Whatever plan is approved, the O'Donnells' report will be a big part of it.
Lefeber said it's the most complete look at the area's history that she's seen. The report is in draft form now, but she said that photos will be added and a more complete document will be available on the port's Web site later this year.
"We'd like to develop a booklet that we could give to the school district as a teaching tool," she added.
The O'Donnells' report looks at how the area started with a few dozen residents in 1890 and sprouted to several thousand by the end of 1892. Just as quickly, the community's boomtown days ended in late 1893 as the country was gripped by a sever depression and industrialist John D. Rockefeller extracted his investment in Everett.
The report continues with Everett's ebbs and flows as businesses and the people who backed them came and went.
The study also looks at events like the Everett Massacre, in which seven people were killed and many others were wounded on the City Dock during a 1916 shootout between the sheriff and his deputies and members of the Industrial Workers of the World, also known as the Wobblies.
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