Bremerton

The Yard and the Ferry Dock

In the 1950 edition of the Writers’ Program guide, the ferry berths at the Bremerton Municipal Dock beside the cranes and red and gray buildings of the Puget Sound Navy Yard, while dark-brown gulls watch from old piling.⁴ That guide reported that almost everything in Bremerton owed its presence to “the yard,” the ruling factor in the economic life of Kitsap County.⁴ The main part of the city stands on Point Turner, about 15 miles west of Seattle, and the shipyard is bordered on three sides by the city and on the south by Sinclair Inlet.^1,2

Wyckoff’s Station and Bremer’s Plat

A naval commission formed in 1888 chose Point Turner for a shipyard, and Lieutenant Ambrose B. Wyckoff, authorized to pay $50 an acre, found settlers asking $200.^2,5,6 William Bremer, a native of Germany in the real estate business, and Henry Paul Hensel bought land at the inflated price and sold some of it to the Navy at $50 an acre.^2,4 Wyckoff took command of the Puget Sound Naval Station on September 16, 1891, and on December 10 that year Bremer filed a 25-acre plat for a new town named Bremerton.^1,2 Bremer gave or sold land cheaply for schools and churches and built the town’s first wharf at his own expense.¹ Work on the first dry dock began in December 1892 and it was finished in 1896, but the Panic of 1893 and a dry-up of federal funding left base and town staggering through the rest of the century.¹ Across Port Washington Narrows, Manette sprang up in the nineties as a lumbering village around Bender’s mill, took first the name of the Decatur, the first boat to stop at its dock, and was annexed by Bremerton in 1918.^4,5

Saloons on Front Street

A weekly, The Bremerton News, began publishing on June 8, 1901, and on October 2 of that year voters incorporated Bremerton as a city of the fourth class.¹ The first mayor, A. L. Croxton in the state guide and Alvyn Croxton in HistoryLink, recalled 17 saloons when he took office, while HistoryLink counts 16, all near the navy’s front gate, in a town of about 1,700 by late 1902.^1,4 An ordinance of 1902 made it a misdemeanor to sell or roast peanuts, loaf, tell stories, or whittle near the yard’s main gate at the foot of 1st Street.⁴ The navy threatened to boycott its own shipyard over the town’s “gross immorality,” and on February 2, 1903, the council doubled saloon license fees and revoked the licenses of the houses nearest the base on Front Street, a ban a pro-saloon faction undid within weeks.¹ By September 4, 1903, Bremer held powers of attorney from nearly all the commercial landowners, and he went to Washington, D.C., to offer the whole town to the navy for $300,000, a price the navy thought exorbitant.¹ Bremer died at 47, and businesses closed for two hours at his burial on December 30, 1910; in 1914 his family built the Bremerton Trust and Savings Bank at 2nd Street and Pacific Avenue, designed by Harlan Thomas.¹ When the Bremer heirs sued over a municipal wharf the city had built to end their wharf monopoly, voters created the Bremerton Port District on October 3, 1913, by 284 to 127.³

Dry Docks, War Shifts, and Sinclair Park

Dry-dock No. 2, of granite and concrete, was completed in March 1913, and during World War I the yard built 25 submarine chasers, six submarines, and 1,700 small boats among other craft.² Employment fell from a wartime 6,500 to fewer than 2,500 by 1927, then the yard expanded through the Great Depression, and its hammerhead crane went up in 1933.^1,2 After Pearl Harbor, five of the six surviving battleships came to Bremerton for repair, and by 1945 the workforce numbered 32,500.² People lived in tents, trailers, converted garages, and chicken coops, and workers on different shifts took turns sleeping in the same bed.¹ The 1940 census counted seven Black residents in Bremerton and by 1945 there were more than 4,500, most of them assigned to Sinclair Park, a housing development on a hill west of town.⁷ Quincy Jones’s family moved to Sinclair Park in 1943, and at eleven he slipped into the community center’s recreation room and found an old piano on the stage.⁷ The houses were dismantled and moved out in 1948, and the community center served as a National Guard armory until it was torn down in late 2002.⁷

Silverdale and the Waterfront

The yard became the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, was made a nuclear-capable repair facility in 1965, and was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1992.^2,8 At Silverdale the Kitsap Mall opened in 1985, J. C. Penney was the first store to leave downtown Bremerton for it, and the commercial core became street after street of empty windows.¹ The city counted 35,301 people in 1970 and 37,259 thirty years later.¹ The battleship Missouri made Bremerton its homeport from 1954 to 1984 and from 1992 to 1998, until tugs towed it to Pearl Harbor in May 1998.⁹ The Port acquired two blocks of the waterfront in 1986, and on May 31, 2008, a 300-slip marina and a 2,000-foot public waterfront park opened to music from a Navy band.³