Take a walk through Everett’s history online

Published 10:43 pm Thursday, February 28, 2008

EVERETT — The waterfront plays a crucial role in Everett’s history and holds a special place in the memories of the city’s residents.

From the busy shipbuilding company that churned out dozens of ships headed to the Pacific during Would War II to a long forgotten American Indian village at the mouth of the Snohomish River, Everett’s waterfront is a trove of history shaped by the tides of time.

“It touches on a lot of important sites in the city,” said Margaret Riddle, a historian with Everett Public Library’s Northwest Room.

Riddle is the author of a recently published online tour for HistoryLink.org, a growing Seattle-based Internet encyclopedia of Washington state history.

Her work was added this week to the nonprofit Web site, which receives about a million page views per week and has more than 4,800 essays on the state’s history.

Riddle’s tour has a map with pinpoints, photos and historical information on 15 locations along a 3-mile long stretch of Port Gardner’s shoreline.

The mostly walkable route along W. Marine View Drive starts in the north near Hebolb, the Snohomish tribe’s winter village, and ends to the south near the former Great Northern Railway depot.

The tour is peppered with vital facts and concise stories about the waterfront.

Two-mile-long Jetty Island, for example, is what’s left of a failed attempt by city leaders to build a freshwater harbor. The project envisioned by John D. Rockefeller’s Everett Land Co. was sidelined because of an economic depression in 1893.

The site where Naval Station Everett parks the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and other ships once held the Everett Pacific Shipbuilding and Drydock Co.

Between 1942 and 1945, the company that employed scores of men and women launched 49 ships to help the war effort.

Then there’s the old City Dock at the western foot of Hewitt Avenue, where the bloody labor dispute known as the Everett Massacre resulted in at least seven deaths and many injuries on Nov. 5, 1916.

The tour also features the wooden schooner Equator, the city’s first property to be placed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The battered sailboat, which now sits on dry land near the Port of Everett’s 10th Street boat launch, was once chartered by author Robert Louis Stevenson, who sailed from Hawaii to Samoa. Stevenson wrote about the boat in his novel “The Wrecker” and nonfiction book “In The South Seas.”

The Everett waterfront cybertour joins 22 others that were created for HistoryLink, including ones for Ballard, Ellensburg and Tacoma’s historic downtown. The Ballard tour, written by HistoryLink co-founder Walt Crowley, who died last year, also has a printable walking tour.

“It’s oriented toward historical tourism,” said Priscilla Long, a senior editor with HistoryLink. “It really does encourage people to go out.”

HistoryLink has about 35 writers around the state, including librarians, historians, journalists and others, Long said.

Essays are vetted by editors for accuracy, fully sourced and dated. Essays are regularly expanded or corrected.

Among the most popular entries is Clark Humphrey’s Essay No. 3263 about Kurt Cobain

The Web site, launched in 1998 with a focus on Seattle and King County, began covering the entire state five years ago this week.

“I’m a real fan,” said historian Lorraine McConaghy with Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry. “What they have done is make history accessible … to anyone with access to the Web.”

MOHAI is a partner organization with HistoryLink and has contributed many photos and essays on items from its collection that were stored in boxes and folders that were not on display at the museum’s gallery.

The Everett cybertour was funded through a $20,000 grant from the Henry M. Jackson Foundation. The grant also paid for several essays about people, places and events that have contributed to the growth and development of Snohomish County.

Reporter David Chircop: 425-339-3429 or dchircop@heraldnet.com.