EVERETT — When city officials today try to persuade businesses to move to Everett, they always mention the city’s stunning waterfront location between the snowcapped Cascade and Olympic mountain ranges.
It’s a key selling point to companies increasingly concerned with quality-of-life issues, and a way to counter the persistent image of Everett as a smelly paper-mill town dotted with smokestacks.
But those smokestacks and the odors that came out of them transformed Everett from a remote outpost into an industrial powerhouse. They provided the money for the elegant buildings along Hewitt and Colby avenues, and meant thousands of jobs.
Several decades ago, "Mill Town" and "City of Smokestacks" were nicknames the city held with pride, and few thought of the waterfront as little but an economic resource to be exploited.
"Smoke belching from the smokestacks was tangible reassurance that all was well, that the plans were up and moving, that my dad will bring home a paycheck and my grandfather will be able to make a payment on his car," said the city’s unofficial historian, David Dilgard.
Today, Kimberly-Clark Corp.’s factory is the only pulp and paper mill left in town. But with the Port of Everett, Naval Station Everett and other nonrecreational uses taking up so much of the waterfront, most of the shoreline remains off-limits to the public.
Last spring, the city adopted an ambitious plan that includes proposed bike and walking trails that would dramatically increase access to the waterfront.
Kimberly-Clark, the city of Everett and the Port of Everett are developing a one-third-acre beach that, when it opens in June, will be the first official public beach accessible from downtown Everett.
But opening access to the shoreline means turning the entire purpose of the working waterfront on its head.
The future of the shoreline was determined in 1891, two years before the city was incorporated, when railroad tracks were built along Possession Sound for the industry that was sure to follow.
Everett quickly turned into a boomtown, with mills, docks, oil-storage tanks and other industrial structures crowding the waterfront.
Even so, people always found a place to swim, said Dilgard, as he sat at a table in the Everett Public Library pointing to a 1905 photograph of a beach that sits on land now partly occupied by Kimberly-Clark.
At the time, it was between a flour mill and a pulp mill. That beach was more formal than most, with a bathhouse, a bathing-suit rental stand and a boat-rental area.
But everyone understood that it was only temporary.
"It was a strip of waterfront that was used until some industrial use could be found for it," Dilgard said.
And the cold water was not the only thing that made a dip in the Sound less than idyllic. It was practically an obstacle course as swimmers dodged chunks of logs and human waste as they moved through the sawdust-covered water.
The beach that Dilgard pointed to in the photo was just down the shoreline from a pipe that the city used to pump out raw sewage. Everett didn’t stop dumping raw sewage into the Sound until 1959.
There’s no record of any open-space movement in the city’s early years. People didn’t live in Everett to ponder the sun reflecting on the gleaming waters of the Sound. They moved here for jobs, and those jobs were concentrated along the waterfront.
That’s not to say that residents and workers back then were passive. They battled the city’s elite over issues such as collective bargaining and higher wages, not access to the waterfront. The city parks department didn’t open its first beach until 1941, at Howarth Park.
As wages rose, more people began moving to Everett for the city’s natural beauty, Dilgard said.
"People had more leisure time, and they had the luxury of being able to have a taste for a better quality of life," he said.
In 1953, the city dropped its "City of Smokestacks" slogan and adopted "The Evergreen City." About the same time, the city christened Highway 99 south of 44th Street "Evergreen Way."
The shingle mills started closing in the 1950s as the stands of cedar trees in other parts of Snohomish County approached depletion.
Stricter environmental regulations in the 1960s and 1970s did in a few more mills. When Weyerhaeuser’s mill on the city’s north end closed in the 1980s, Kimberly-Clark became the last mill in town.
Today, Kimberly-Clark’s giant factory would seem like an obstacle to the growing desire to open up the waterfront.
Activists have pushed for greater access to the waterfront so bicyclists can ride a continuous loop from Mukilteo to the Everett riverfront. But they quickly add that they would hate to see Kimberly-Clark leave.
They don’t mind designing bike paths around the mill.
"It’s the last real connection with Everett’s industrial-waterfront past," said David Mascarenas of the Everett Shorelines Coalition. "Kimberly-Clark is the only thing left that resembles an old-time mill, and I think it’s kind of cool that it’s there."
For John Carpenter, the mill has been more than a symbol of Everett’s industrial past. Since 1954, the plant has provided well-paying union jobs to his family, first to his late father and now to him and his brother. Many people he went to Everett High School with started working at the plant right out of school, and some of them have now been there for decades.
"It’s meant stable incomes for a lot of people in this community for a long time," said Carpenter, 60, who is the mill’s safety coordinator.
Carpenter’s boss, Chris Isenberg, helped put himself through college working summers at the mill, and is now the pulp-mill manager. And Isenberg, 37, is following in the footsteps of his father, Morris, 74, who retired as the mill’s distribution center manager in 1987.
Carpenter said he and other workers get emotional sometimes when they look at the old mill and think of what it has provided for their families — and what it symbolizes for Everett.
"If you took this mill out of here, it would be like taking Pike Place Market out of Seattle," Carpenter said. "This is our history. I don’t know what Everett would do without it."
Reporter David Olson:
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