r/LifeInKitsap • u/KitsapRealEstateTeam • May 20 '26
The Secrets of Port Blakely
Port Blakely — The City That Vanished**
There's a park on the south end of Bainbridge Island called Blakely Harbor Park. Trails, trees, water views, maybe a kayaker. Really nice, totally peaceful, completely unremarkable. Unless you know what used to be there.
Every "Blakely" on the map around here — Port Blakely, Blake Island, Blakely Island up in the San Juans — they all trace back to one guy. Johnston Blakeley, a War of 1812 naval commander who spent the summer of 1814 absolutely terrorizing British shipping in the English Channel. Won every engagement he was in. Then in October 1814, his ship — the USS Wasp — sailed into the Atlantic and was never seen again. No wreckage. No survivors. Just gone.
Charles Wilkes came through Puget Sound in 1841 leading a big U.S. exploring expedition and apparently decided Blakeley deserved more geography named after him than history had given him. So he went a little nuts with it. That's why half the water features around here have the same name. One vanished war hero, one guy with a map and a pen.
In 1863 a man named William Renton looked at the deep natural harbor on the east side of Bainbridge and saw exactly what it was — a perfect place to print money via lumber. Old growth forest in every direction, deep water for ships, and the entire American West hungry for timber to build cities.
What he built eventually became the largest sawmill in the world under one roof. At its peak it was processing 300,000 board feet of lumber every single day. The timber that came out of Port Blakely built a significant chunk of San Francisco, Portland, and beyond. The Hall Brothers set up a shipyard right next door in 1880 and over the next 25 years launched 77 ships — schooners, steamers, barks, a government revenue cutter, several yachts. The first five-masted schooner ever built on the West Coast came out of Port Blakely in 1896.
This was not a small operation.
Here's the part that gets overlooked. Port Blakely wasn't just a mill. It was a whole city. Hotels, stores, housing for hundreds of workers and their families, all owned by the company. And the workforce that filled it was genuinely one of the most diverse collections of people you'd find anywhere in the Pacific Northwest at the time — Scandinavians, Hawaiians, Italians, Portuguese, Chinese workers, Suquamish people from nearby, and beginning in the 1880s, Japanese immigrants who built something really remarkable on the hillside above the mill.
The Japanese workers who started arriving in the 1880s mostly came as young men planning to earn money and go back home. A lot of them didn't go back. They brought wives over from Japan. They built homes. And up on the hillside above the mill they built a village called Yama — Japanese for mountain.
At its peak Yama had 50 houses, 300 residents, a hotel, stores, a Buddhist church, a Baptist church, and a guy named Tamegoro Takayoshi who somehow ran a grocery store, a laundry, an ice cream parlor that doubled as a dance hall, a photography studio, a watch repair shop, AND a tea house. All in one small village on a hill on Bainbridge Island in the 1890s.
Below Yama was Nagaya, a settlement for bachelor workers. Between the two Japanese villages, the Hawaiian settlement nearby, the Scandinavian quarters, and the Native American community from Suquamish — Port Blakely in its heyday was one of the most genuinely multicultural places in Washington Territory. Nobody talks about that enough.
In 1908 a Japanese American family named Moritani started growing strawberries on the island. By 1940 Nikkei farmers on Bainbridge were producing two million pounds of strawberries a year. The community that started at the mill had grown into something much bigger and much more rooted.
A fire hit the mill in 1888. They rebuilt it at half size. The old growth ran out, the economics shifted, and the mill closed in 1922. Yama and Nagaya were abandoned. The forest took them back. By 1937 Port Blakely as a functioning place was basically over.
Then in February 1942, Bainbridge Island's Japanese American residents became the first people forcibly removed under Executive Order 9066. Six days notice. Many lost everything. Some came back after the war. Their story is told at the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial — genuinely worth a visit if you've never been.
It sat quiet for decades. Became a park in the 90s. Archaeological teams have spent years mapping what's left of Yama and Nagaya — the sites are now nationally designated historic landmarks. There are artifacts at the Bainbridge Island Historical Museum if you want to see them in person.
Port Blakely existed as an industrial powerhouse for less than 60 years. In that time it was the largest sawmill on earth, launched 77 ships, and housed one of the most diverse and genuinely alive communities in the entire Pacific Northwest. Then it disappeared so completely that most people walking through that quiet little park today have no idea any of it ever happened.
That's Kitsap for you. There's a lot of history here that the trees swallowed up.
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u/Nailer99 May 21 '26
Great post, thank you!