Vashon Island, WA

Vashon Island, Clinging to Isolation

Even many natives of Seattle, Wash., don’t know where Vashon Island is, and that’s just fine with the island, which is pretty much trying to become invisible these days.

This isn’t easy for a 12-mile-long stretch of woodlands, farms, quiet shops, and 10,430 citizens in the middle of Puget Sound, a scant half mile from Tacoma and only a few nautical miles from downtown Seattle. Vashon has long been a peaceful, rural retreat, and residents are determined to preserve the quiet character of the island sandwiched between Washington’s two largest cities.

Islanders several years ago even tried to break away from Seattle’s King County, but the state Supreme Court wouldn’t let islanders vote on the issue. And when the state Department of Transportation held a hearing on the question of building a bridge to Vashon from the mainland, several thousand citizens showed up to say they’d rather remain somewhat inaccessible.

“The longer you live on Vashon Island, the more you realize that we live in a very delicate place,” says resident Sharon Nelson, who has been active in efforts to preserve the island’s resources—including an effort to prevent expansion of a strip mining operation, which would supply thousands of tons of rock for a third runway at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.

“We islanders are a group that is very determined,” Nelson explains. “We sometimes quibble among ourselves, but don’t violate our shores.”

Several ferry routes connect Vashon to Seattle and Tacoma, and visitors regularly make the trip to enjoy the island countryside, which includes forests, beaches, farms, and a 10-acre park on nearby Maury Island (connected to Vashon by a narrow spit of land), where whales often are spotted in a narrow, deep channel by the beach. Or, they walk through the quiet town of Vashon (pop. 1,100), discovering an eclectic mix of bookstores, art shops, antiques, lots of places to eat—and the Vashon Hardware Company and Tool Museum.

The latter is run by Gary Barrentine, whose grandfather opened the hardware store in 1929 in the 1889 structure, which now is a historic landmark.

The pervasive presence of Seattle is clearly evident, however, if only in the design and naming of streets on Vashon Island. Many of the major roads on the island are straight-line extensions of streets in Seattle. For example, 107th Ave. SW on the island picks up on the other side of Puget Sound and continues into Seattle as if some early-day city planner had laid a T-square on the map and run Seattle streets across the water and onto the island.

In 1877, three pioneer families were lured to Vashon by the promise of 160 acres of land to any man who staked out a claim and lived on it for five years under the federal Homestead Act of 1862. Even in early pioneer days, Vashon Islanders commuted to the mainland for work. Salmon D. Sherman, who came to the island in 1877 with his wife and four children, managed a blacksmith shop in Tacoma when he was not clearing land on Vashon.

Vashon Island offered thousands of acres of timberland, plentiful fishing, and productive farmland. In 1910, the island produced 165,000 crates of strawberries, making it one of the premier berry-producing regions in the country. By the 1920s, the strawberry maggot had decimated the berry crop, however. Today the berries are grown only at a few U-pick farms, but their place in history is remembered each July with the Vashon Strawberry Festival, which lures thousands of visitors from the mainland. The abandoned Beall greenhouses have been declared a King County historical site and have been rehabilitated to serve as artists’ studios.

The island has long been a haven for writers, perhaps the best known of whom was novelist Betty MacDonald, who lived on the island from 1942 to 1956. Her Onions in the Stew celebrated life on Vashon and became a best-seller a few years after her better-known novel, The Egg and I. The roster of well-known artists includes ceramist Akio Takamori, painters Jack Chevalier and Claudia Hollander, printmaker Art Hansen, and sculptor Joanne Hammer.

The island’s low-key environment also has attracted computer wizards, horse breeders, ostrich ranchers, skilled professionals, a pair of Orthodox monks, two former governors, and a well-known TV actor.

And yet, strangely enough, many Seattle natives aren’t exactly sure where Vashon Island is. It’s somewhere “over there,” they say, gesturing vaguely westward, and that’s fine with Vashon Islanders.

Robert Miskimmon is a freelance writer on Vashon Island.

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