Port Madison

On a narrow arm of Port Madison Bay, at the north end of Bainbridge Island, sits a quiet neighborhood of waterfront homes. It looks like a place where nothing much ever happened. In fact this was once one of the busiest industrial centers on Puget Sound, the first seat of Kitsap County, and the spot where local settlers decided their new county would not be named for a battlefield death.

The Six Months It Was Slaughter County

The Washington Territorial Legislature created the county on January 17, 1857. Mill owners on the Kitsap Peninsula had asked for one of their own, tired of rowing to Seattle or Port Townsend just to record a deed. The lawmakers named the county for U.S. Army Lieutenant William A. Slaughter, who had been killed on the White River a little over a year earlier during the fighting between settlers and Native people. So for its first months the place was Slaughter County.

The residents disliked it. When they gathered at Port Madison to organize the county government, they voted for a name rooted in the land itself. On July 13, 1857, the county became Kitsap, after a Suquamish war leader remembered for his strategy and power, the same Kitsap who had turned back Haida raiders at Battle Point on this island and whose people were tied to the great cedar longhouse called Old Man House across Agate Passage. Port Madison served as the county seat until 1893.

Meigs and His Mill

The town owed its life to one man. George Anson Meigs, born in Shelburne, Vermont in 1816, came west during the California gold rush and opened a lumber business in San Francisco. In 1854 he bought J. J. Felt’s sawmill, moved it to Port Madison, and never really left. The mill stood near Old Man House, and many of the men who worked it were Suquamish.

Meigs built fast. By 1858 the mill was cutting 15,000 board feet a day and ranked among the leading plants on the Sound. He added the first brass and iron foundry in Washington Territory, a machine shop, and a shipyard. From that yard came the Wildwood, at 1,099 tons the first full-rigged sailing ship built on the Pacific Coast. Meigs even helped build the University of Washington and served as an early regent.

Fortune ran hot and cold. On February 18, 1861, a boiler exploded and wrecked the mill, killing five men. In 1864 the mill burned, a loss of $100,000. Each time Meigs rebuilt bigger. In the first six months of 1870 alone, running day and night, the mill cut and shipped nearly 11.9 million board feet, and Meigs’s fleet of lumber ships had grown to 45,000 tons.

The Slow Fade

The good years did not hold. Meigs’s partner William Gawley speculated with company money, and by 1881 the legal and financial tangle was too much. The mill complex was sold at a sheriff’s auction. It limped on under new owners and finally closed for good in 1892. With the work gone, the town emptied. In 1893 the voters moved the county seat to Port Orchard, in what one account called one of the hottest political fights in county history.

Meigs spent his last years on his Port Madison property. On March 3, 1897, he traveled to Seattle to testify in a lawsuit. Heading back to catch the night boat home, he vanished in the dark. His body was found the next morning on the deck of a freighter, and the coroner ruled the death an accident.

What Remains

Port Madison never came back as a mill town, and that is part of its charm today. The old industrial waterfront is now a leafy residential enclave with a New England feel, its houses looking out over the bay. Meigs Park preserves a green corner of the community and keeps his name on the map. Across Agate Passage, Old Man House Park in Suquamish, returned to the Suquamish Tribe by Washington State Parks in 2004, marks the longhouse site tied to Chief Kitsap and Chief Seattle. And the county that got its name here, on a summer day in 1857, still carries it more than a century and a half later.