By John Kendall For Peninsula Daily News
At noon July 4, 1890, a rifle shot was heard in Port Angeles.
With that signal a horde of people rushed south into the forest.
They were claiming land to which they hoped to eventually get title.
To the U.S. government — which owned the land — they were squatters.
On that Independence Day, they were dependent on the hope they could persuade the government that they would be worthy of land titles in the future, but for now it was a gamble that would take 4½ years to resolve in their favor.
By mid-1890, Port Angeles had too many people and not enough city land to develop.
Much of the land near the waterfront was a reserve — barred from development until the U.S. government could decide what to do with it.
So for 42 years, the development of Port Angeles was literally held in reserve.
It began with Victor Smith.
Abraham Lincoln’s administration appointed him collector of Customs for the Puget Sound district, and he arrived at the port of entry, Port Townsend, on July 30, 1859.
He immediately disliked Port Townsend, its 300 inhabitants and its Admiralty Inlet location. He persuaded the administration to move the port of entry to Port Angeles, which enraged Port Townsend.
Smith reasoned that Port Angeles had a better harbor and a better vantage point to monitor British activities at Esquimalt, B.C., the naval hub of Vancouver Island.
On June 18, 1862, Lincoln approved moving the port of entry and created a military and naval reserve. Port Angeles became what some boosters called “the Second National City,” with the nation’s capital, the other Washington, being the first.
That claim lost luster in March 1863, when Lincoln — needing revenue to fight the Civil War — signed the Townsite Act, which authorized him “to reserve from the public lands . . . to be surveyed into urban and suburban lots . . . and to be offered for sale at public outcry to the highest bidder.”
Port Angeles qualified, and Smith urged the state land commissioner to survey the military and naval reserve.
Six-hundred acres of the 3,640 total acres were divided into 50-foot by 140-foot townsite lots and the rest were split into 5- and 10-acre parcels and left in the reserve.
So the portion west of Tumwater, east of and including Ediz Hook and north of what is now called Lauridsen Boulevard remained in the reserve, while the townsite east of Tumwater, north of Sixth Street to Laurel and north of Fourth Street from Laurel eastward was for sale.
Two hundred lots were ready on May 4, 1864, when only 30 sales were recorded.
“And why was this?’ asked Thomas Bradley.
“Because the parcels of land offered for sale were choked to uselessness . . . and because private individuals could not afford to trespass upon or improve that vast tract [the reserve].”
On his way back to Port Angeles, Smith drowned in a ship disaster off California on July 30, 1865, at age 39.
Port Townsend regained its port of entry status in June 1866.
Had he lived longer, Smith might have persuaded the federal government to develop Port Angeles because no one else, it seemed, cared to.
“The small area available for occupancy along the beach was the only part of the town improved from 1862 to 1890,” wrote Bradley, “ . . . In 1883 only five insignificant structures remained in the town.”
So Port Angeles was strangled in seclusion until 1887 when the Puget Sound Cooperative Colony chose Ennis Creek to launch its utopian labor experiment, which soon foundered amid internal bickering and ended in bankruptcy in 1904.
For Port Angeles, the colony’s skilled workers were hired to build churches and schools. Some settled south and west of the reserve.
In 1889, Washington became a state.
Even though it would be four years before Seattle got its long-sought rail link east to St. Paul, Minn., many in Western Washington couldn’t wait. They caught “railroad fever,” believing it was only a matter of time before a railroad would lay track from Portland, Ore., to their community — so buy up land now.
For true believers in Port Angeles, the only question was the railroad coming up Hood Canal and west or up from Grays Harbor and east?
The year 1890 was a crucial one for Port Angeles.
It began the year with 400 residents and at year’s end it would have 3,500. On June 11, it incorporated as a city.
Apparently word had spread that the city, despite the reserve, was ripe for growth. Bradley mentioned there were as many as 5,000 in the city in 1890.
Clay Wolverton, the longtime fire chief, wrote of the tension:
“The boardwalks of Port Angeles on Front Street creaked with the boots of several thousand restless, prospective settlers.
“They faced a land dilemma — the Strait of Juan de Fuca was in front of them, a great Government reserve just behind them on a hill.”
What to do? To many, the answer was “jump the reserve” — act now and take a chance on the future.
Its champion was John C. Murphy, who organized meetings and developed a consensus:
On July 4, a land rush would begin and each claim would be limited to two city lots, 50 feet by 140 feet each — one as a residence, the other for farming and crops.
Wolverton described that day:
“People literally picked up their beds off the beach and walked backed into the timber and started to set roots down on their property by-guess-by-God surveyor fashion. Trees were cut, brush burned and cedar shake picket fences were spaced around their lots.”
“Armed with axes and surveyor’s tape, they marched solemnly into the forest and began staking claims,” wrote Patricia Campbell, author of A History of the North Olympic Peninsula.
“All was done with fairness — lots of equal size, no more than two to any one family, shanties or tents to be set up as proof of true homesteader status. Within weeks, the lanterns of the squatters lighted the night forest like fireflies.”
A carpenter, David O’Brien, and others had nailed shingles with the message “this block donated for school purposes” around a block with the northwest border of Eighth and C streets, site of a one-room Tumwater School in 1891, later Lincoln School.
The new, now hopeful landowners formed their own group by August, the Squatters Aid Association of Port Angeles. Membership fee was 50 cents.
The association encouraged its members to improve their lots while a plat was created to help clarify problems with earlier surveys.
The young state’s sole congressman, John L. Wilson, received many letters from association members and civic leaders.
He was urged to change existing statutes so those original squatters who improved their lots “shall be entitled to prove up and purchase same at maximum price of forty and minimum price of ten dollars per lot at any time before the day of sale by the government.”
The legislation was eventually approved. On Jan. 1, 1894, at a public sale, the former squatters could gain title if they paid the fee and “proved up” that they improved their property since July 5, 1890.
Those who jumped at a chance to be homesteaders on that July Fourth had persuaded the government that they were now landowners — without one shot fired in anger.
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John Kendall is a writer-researcher who lives in Port Angeles.
In December 2009, he wrote a three-part PDN series on the Press Expedition, which opened the Olympic Mountains to the world, to commemorate the 120th anniversary of the expedition: https://www.peninsuladailynews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2009312099992
