Friday Harbor

Spring Street Above the Ferry Dock

Spring Street runs uphill from the ferry dock and takes its name from the freshwater spring at its head; it is still the town’s main thoroughfare.⁵ Friday Harbor is the seat of San Juan County and, by HistoryLink’s account, the county’s only incorporated town, with 2,260 residents in 2010 on the east shore of central San Juan Island.¹ The town can be reached by water and air only, and its economy rests on tourism, real estate, and construction where it once rested on fishing, farming, lime quarrying, and shipbuilding.¹

The Shepherd Called Friday

In 1853 the Hudson’s Bay Company set up Belle Vue Sheep Farm at the south end of San Juan Island, and in the 1850s it put a Hawaiian shepherd named Friday in charge of a sheep station near the harbor.⁶ The National Park Service gives his Hawaiian name as Po`alima, meaning Friday, and says he reached the Pacific Northwest in 1842 at the age of 12, while Brenda Pratt’s 2003 research puts his departure from the Sandwich Islands in 1841.^2,3 For generations islanders have told how a sailing vessel looking for shelter followed a thin trail of smoke into the harbor, and how the shepherd, thinking the oarsmen asked his name, answered “Friday.”³ A British surveyor mapped the bay as “Friday’s Bay” in 1859, and the town, first called Friday’s Harbor, later dropped the “’s.”^1,3 Many accounts named Joe Friday as the namesake, but Pratt found that the namesake was Peter Friday (1830-1894) and that Joe would still have been a very young child.^1,3 When the other Hawaiians left the island in 1872, the Friday family stayed and claimed its homestead in Joe’s name, because he, born in Washington Territory, alone qualified as an American citizen.^2,3

Warbass’s Townsite and the First Stores

The Pig War, set off in 1859 when the American Lyman Cutler shot a British pig, ended in 1872 with the island ruled American and placed in Whatcom County.¹ Edward Warbass, who had first come to the island in 1859 as a sutler for the U.S. Army, organized the 1873 petition that created San Juan County.¹ Elected county auditor, Warbass judged the then-uninhabited land on Friday Harbor a better county seat than San Juan Town, an unruly settlement of saloons and brothels near American Camp.¹ The next August the commissioners named the site Friday Harbor and authorized a 16-by-24-foot county building, but when Warbass tried to sell lots at the townsite nobody was buying, because land elsewhere could be claimed free under the 1860 Homestead Act.^1,6 The post office opened in January 1876, and that year Joseph Sweeney moved from Orcas Island to open a store at the corner of Spring and Second streets.⁶ Few settled until the early 1880s, when Israel Katz opened a second store, the Produce Exchange, at Front and Spring, and Front Street lots that had sold for $20 soon went for hundreds of dollars.⁶ The Katz store later served Jack Douglas as the Saloon Best, and in 1884 his brother William built a home across the trail that HistoryLink says became the island’s first hotel, the William Douglas House.^5,6

Salmon, Sawmills, and the Dry Vote

In 1894 the Island Packing Company opened a salmon cannery at the base of East Street, canned at first by seasonal Chinese crews and a decade later largely by Japanese workers.⁶ Adam C. Brown built a steam saw and planing mill on the waterfront in August 1894, and in 1904 the Jensen brothers and Joe Groll built a second mill that also built ships and supplied the town’s electricity.⁶ The University of Washington opened a marine-biology station in Friday Harbor in 1904; HistoryLink’s town history has it moving to Point Caution north of town in 1923, its waterfront history in 1924, and it is now Friday Harbor Laboratories.^1,6 The town voted on February 2, 1909, to incorporate, 70 to 55, choosing bank president Gene Gould as mayor, and by 1913 water ran to it by gravity from Trout Lake.¹ In 1912 the Friday Harbor Packing Company rebuilt the cannery into a 300-by-250-foot structure, ranking fifth of 19 canneries in the Puget Sound/Northern Straits region that year.^1,6 Billy Sunday came over from Bellingham by steamer on May 9, 1910, preached against liquor in the Odd Fellows Hall, and the next day the town voted to go dry.⁴ Jack Douglas of the Saloon Best carried his stock by boat to Brown Island and sold from a tent, and three men drowned in the following months trying to get there or back.⁴

The Cannery Closes and the Port Opens

Fish traps were outlawed in 1934, freight costs priced island produce out of the market, and the salmon cannery closed in 1966.¹ Voters formed the Port of Friday Harbor 354 to 146 on September 12, 1950; its first main pier went in in 1968, and its marina now has 500 slips.⁷ In 1910 Albert Jensen left his brothers’ sawmill to start a shipyard south of town, where he and his son Nourdine built 150 boats.⁶ In the circular park at the bottom of Spring Street, Memorial Park was dedicated on November 11, 1921, to the nine San Juan County servicemen who died in World War I.⁶ On April 7, 2022, a fire later found to have been deliberately set destroyed three historic buildings, the oldest of them a hotel for more than a century before it became a real-estate office.⁵