Halfway between Seattle and Vancouver lies the cutest seaside city of Anacortes, Washington. It sits on Fidalgo Island in Skagit County, and this area of Washington enjoys more sunny days than the rest of the state.
Anacortes is the main dock and terminal for ferries to the San Juan Islands. There is also the most adorable Marina with wild deer roaming the streets, sweet, little restaurants and a Turkish Cafe line the Marina parking lot.
This was home to the Samish and the Swinomish people for thousands of years. Old-growth cedar and Douglas fir trees dominated the landscape from seashore to lake shore. These Coast Salish tribes oriented their villages toward the abundance of the sea, and built a wealthy and sophisticated culture based on harvesting salmon and shellfish, fashioning clothing and basketry from natural materials, while plying the waters in canoes for trade, harvest and occasional raids.
Spanish and British explorers arrived in the late 1700s to map and name many of the surrounding islands and waterways: Rosario Strait, Guemes Channel, Padilla Bay, and the San Juan Islands. White pioneers began arriving on Fidalgo Island in the 1850s, and were drawn to the meadow lands of March's Point for their settlements – now the site of two oil refineries – because the land was already clear for farming. The settlement of Anacortes required the removal of mammoth trees, and the abundance of wood supplied early lumber mills, providing the materials for Anacortes' homes, stores, wharves, even the planking for streets.
Anacortes was named in 1879 by railroad surveyor Amos Bowman and named in honor of his wife, Anne Curtis. Bowman promoted Anacortes as the "New York of the West," ultimately failing to establish the urban center he envisioned.
The fishing tradition depicted in television’s The Deadliest Catch began in the 1890s as Anacortes men ventured to Alaskan waters for months of danger at sea. The town’s early fishing industry was based on schooners like Lizzie Colby and Wawona that sailed from Anacortes to the Bering Sea and brought back tons of salted cod, which was then dried on racks, then packaged and shipped internationally. Mechanized salmon processing began in 1894 at the Fidalgo Island Canning Company, and expanded to eleven seafood canneries operating along the swift-moving Guemes Channel, allowing Anacortes to boast of being "the Salmon Canning Capital of the World." The salmon fishery attracted immigrants: fishermen from Scandinavia and Croatia, cannery workers from Japan, and Chinese men, who sometimes arrived illegally on the boat of Smuggler Kelly, a Confederate veteran who occasionally eluded the authorities with cargoes of opium; and Chinese workers brought from Canada.
Smugglers, bootleggers, sailors, fishermen, lumberjacks and other adventurers created an atmosphere of a frontier town, which would remain a part of Anacortes for decades to come. This was balanced by teachers, ministers, boosters and laborers who, thanks to hard work in a land rich in resources, survived periodic hard times and a rowdy past to succeed in becoming a proper city.
The early Anacortes waterfront buzzed with the "mosquito fleet," a flurry of big and small steamships and little gas launches that connected Puget Sound's communities during an era when roads were inferior to water travel. International and inter-island travelers depended on these passenger boats, and later the car ferries of the Black Ball Line evolved to become the current state ferry system.
The arrival of Shell in 1953 and Texaco in 1957 created jobs for locals and brought in a wave of newcomers to the community.
During the 1960s, when Anacortes became an All-America City, the lumber and fishing industries held onto some vitality before diminishing rapidly in the following decades. Anacortes weathered the rapid changes of the 20th century and entered into the new century with many of its traditions intact: good schools, preservation of nature balanced with working-class jobs, encouragement of artists and adventurers, and open arms for tourists like us.
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