EVERETT – Members of Everett fishing families who have seen the commercial fleet dwindle to just a few boats are looking for help to preserve its long history.
The fleet, consisting largely of families who emigrated from Croatia and Norway, once had scores of boats working out of Everett.
High expenses, dwindling fish runs, the introduction of farmed salmon, a lack of local fish processors and other issues have contributed to the fleet’s near demise.
Soon the net sheds that provide work space for the fishermen will be razed to make way for a $400 million development by the Port of Everett and Maritime Trust of Chicago.
Kay Zuanich, who’s helping to lead a committee to produce a fishermen’s tribute, said she and co-chairwoman Barbara Martinis Piercey realized the loss of the sheds might eliminate the last remnants of the fleet.
“We felt that all that history of what the fishing industry had done in Everett would be gone,” she said. “We felt that people who would go down there wouldn’t even know that we had a fishing industry that was an important part of the economy.”
She said that Everett boats heading for Alaska would buy all their staples to feed a crew of seven to nine people for several months and stock up on fuel and equipment. Those fishing in Puget Sound would not only provide jobs for their own crews, but for fish processors as well.
What started as work to produce a fishermen’s memorial at the Everett harbor has evolved into much more, Zuanich said.
“We thought we’d be like every other town on the coast and have this statue representing the lost fisherman,” she added. “Now it’s grown to something else entirely.”
The group has received an anonymous donation of $10,000 to start things off and has won the support of the port and Maritime Trust.
“I think it’s very appropriate that they have something like that,” said Don Hopkins, a port commissioner who is on the tribute committee. “That was a very important industry.”
The community doesn’t have much written or archived about the fishing industry, Hopkins said.
“I think the fishermen were a pretty solitary lot mostly,” he said. “And they did all their work where no one in their right mind would go to anyway. I think it’s a shame the way fishing is now. They have no days to fish.”
Piercey said that the early fishermen were mostly immigrants who didn’t go to school beyond the fourth or fifth grade. “They didn’t keep diaries,” she said.
Piercey said it’s important that the history of the fleet be recorded now, while there are still people living who recall the early years.
Port director John Mohr said the port supports preserving that history. A tribute could be included in a new administration building the port is considering in the waterfront development. “If we go ahead with a new building, the tribute will be in that building,” he said. “I’ll certainly be recommending to the commissioners that we do.”
Ken Olsen, director of land development for Maritime’s western region, said the company is very supportive of the efforts. “We’ve offered them a location on the site or several locations if they want to do more than one thing.”
The group will have to make the decision, Olsen said, but Maritime has offered to create a 95-foot-tall memorial tower in the development’s market square, which could be attached to the new port office.
The tower would be a landmark for the development.
“We would look at it as a point in the landscape that people can refer too,” he said. “At the base of that tower might be the interpretive material that they are collecting.”
Whatever the size or shape of the tribute, Zuanich said, she’d like to see photos, oral histories, artifacts and maybe even a book to capture the industry’s people and events.
Such items could be displayed at different spots along the public walkway that will encircle the development, Olsen said.
“There might be a piece of history at all the different locations,” he added.
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