The Empire of Lime: How Roche Harbor Built a Company Town
By 1891, the San Juan archipelago had been transformed from a series of failed ventures into a million-dollar industrial powerhouse, complete with its own church, school, and company store.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The lime industry of Western Washington, which is the principal on the Pacific coast, is entirely situate in the Archipelago de Haro, known as San Juan county. Eleven principal veins have so far been traced through the field. The immense ledge now being worked at Roche Harbor passes across Orcas island and through the northwest corner of San Juan island. This vein has a known thickness of seventy or eighty feet. It is a gray, very pure, compact limestone of the very purest quality for building purposes.
About the year 1885, Mr. McMillin, a lawyer of Tacoma, bought the Roche Harbor works for a Tacoma company. From that date to the present time, under Mr. McMillin's management, the works have grown to be the largest and most valuable in the Northwest. When purchased there were only two stone kilns and four houses in the village. Today there is a large village of well-built houses, erected by the company, with church, schoolhouse, hotel, and a large store. The plant has been enlarged by the addition of several iron monitor kilns, the output having been increased from 150 barrels a day to about 750. The value of the property has risen year by year, until today it is valued at $1,000,000.
“One thing has certainly been demonstrated by the Roche Harbor works, and that is, that only large works can be made good paying properties.”
The transition from small-scale wildcat operations to a monolithic, corporate-owned company town mirrors the boom-and-bust development cycles that have defined Puget Sound’s industrial history. Roche Harbor eventually transitioned from a lime works into one of Washington's most prominent historic resorts, demonstrating the enduring power of land-use transformation in the San Juan Islands.
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