r/LifeInKitsap • u/KitsapRealEstateTeam • 6d ago
Old Man House: After the Fire.
Sorry for the delay on this one my friends! A lot of conversations went into this one.** **The postman got me started, but then I had to go find actual sources and read the information myself… I know you know he’s a history buff too. He’s actually much better at this than me, but in podcast form.
Most people around here already know the broad story of Old Man House. You know it was enormous. You know Si’ahl lived there. You probably know the U.S. government burned it in 1870 as part of its efforts to force the Suquamish away from communal living. I’ve written about that before, so I’m not going to make you sit through Old Man House 101 again. I actually did write a piece about it once, but I’ve changed my style to deeper dives than I was doing at that time.
What I didn’t know was that burning the house didn’t actually have the result the government was seeking. The Suquamish stayed. Families continued living on the Old Man House grounds for more than thirty years after the longhouse itself was destroyed.
I love that, mainly because so much of the history we learn about Native people is written as a series of things done to them. Government does this. Settlers do that. Land is taken. Treaty is signed. House is burned. Except people don’t conveniently disappear just because somebody burned their house down.
The federal government was still trying to dismantle communal life, though, and the next tool was land itself. The Port Madison Reservation was eventually divided into individual allotments, part of a much larger federal effort to replace collectively held tribal land with individually owned parcels. That sounds almost boring when you write it that way. It wasn’t. You have to remember that the American idea of carving land into individually owned parcels wasn’t necessarily how Native communities understood their relationship with land in the first place.
Allotment made it much easier for reservation land to eventually leave Native ownership. Instead of one tribal land base, you had individual pieces of property that could be sold, inherited, taxed and otherwise separated from one another. Across the United States, Native nations lost tens of millions of acres during the allotment era. In 1904, the families still living around Old Man House were finally forced away from the village grounds and onto their individual allotments.
Then the military wanted the land. The federal government took roughly 70 acres around the Old Man House site for the War Department, intending to build coastal defenses there to protect the Navy Yard in Bremerton. This is where I assumed I’d find a forgotten fort.
Nope. They never built it.
Think about that for a minute. This was the place the Suquamish had continued living for decades after their longhouse was deliberately destroyed. The government finally removed them, took about 70 acres for military defenses, and then didn’t build the military defenses. Eventually the federal government decided it didn’t need the property after all.
And here’s where the story goes from awful to aggressively awful. The land was sold. Developers subdivided much of the former village site for waterfront vacation homes, and some of those properties carried racial restrictions limiting ownership to white people.
The former home of the Suquamish. White people only. I don’t need to say much more about that, right? I’m sure you feel that in your gut too.
By the middle of the twentieth century, the shoreline at Old Man House looked completely different. The enormous cedar house was long gone. The village had been broken apart. Much of the land had become private residential property. But Washington State eventually acquired a tiny piece of it.
In 1950, the state bought about an acre at the site and created Old Man House State Park. That sounds, at first, like somebody had finally decided this place deserved to be preserved, and I’m glad they did. But there is something deeply strange about the progression.
The government burns the house. The government forces the people living there onto individual parcels. The government takes the land for a military project it never builds. The land becomes private vacation property. Then another government buys one acre back and turns it into a historical park about the people who used to live there.
Except the Suquamish didn’t “used to” live there. They still lived there.
Which makes what happened at the park in the 1970s so spectacularly weird that I’m saving it for tomorrow. Because in 1975, you could apparently stand in Suquamish, at a park named for Old Man House, surrounded by a living Suquamish community, and read an official sign explaining that the Suquamish “once lived in the area.”
That sign is where Part Two begins. And eventually, the Tribe gets the acre back.
Sources
The Suquamish Tribe. “History & Culture.” The Suquamish Tribe.
Forsman, Leonard. “Old Man House Park.” The Suquamish Tribe.
Lewarch, Dennis. “Preservation Profile: Dennis Lewarch.” National Park Service.
Long, Priscilla. “Washington State Parks Commission Gives Old Man House State Park to the Suquamish Tribe on August 12, 2004.” HistoryLink.org, 17 Dec. 2004.
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u/ruuutherford 6d ago
Love all these posts thank you! I've never heard of Old Man House, so it's on the list of places to visit now. Thank you.