When Olympia Was a Navy Port
A veteran recalls the 1871 visit of the USS Saranac, a time when Tacoma did not yet exist.
F. E. Pressler, chief clerk of the chief quartermaster’s office at Vancouver, Wash., is in Seattle. In speaking of his first visit to the Sound in 1871, while on board the United States man-of-war Saranac, he said: 'The Saranac went to Olympia and remained there a week or ten days. General O’Brien lived there then and we were royally entertained. We stopped at Seattle again on our return to the ocean; we didn’t visit Tacoma, for there was no such place then. After leaving Seattle the Saranac went north as far as Sitka, stopping at Victoria, Esquimalt and other points of interest. The following year she was lost in the Straits of Georgia while on the way to Alaska.'
“We didn’t visit Tacoma, for there was no such place then.”
This account captures the rapid, volatile growth of the Puget Sound region in the late 19th century. It serves as a reminder that cities like Tacoma were not inevitable, but rather products of specific railroad and industrial booms that reshaped the map in just a few decades.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.