The Historical Lime Kiln Towns of Orcas Island
Did you know there are abandoned towns on Orcas that most of us have never heard of? Did you know about Ocean? - not the one with salt water, but a town called Ocean, Washington. It used to sit on a ledge surrounded by cliffs on the west side of the island. If you happened to stumble upon it now, you might not even know it, but if you look closely, you will see that it was once a busy place.
The town of Ocean was established in 1889 . There is a record of a post office there from 1890 to 1894
From about the 1860s on there was a great demand for lime in the Pacific Northwest, mostly for mortar to build brick buildings. After the Seattle fire in 1889, the city passed a requirement that buildings be made of brick, not wood, to create a “fire resistant” city. In 1906 there was a great earthquake in San Francisco that created another huge demand for lime to help rebuild that city.
Before roads and gasoline engines, the majority of transportation in the Pacific Northwest was by sea. It was `practical for lime companies to set up camps and small towns on islands where lime was found. The companies made quarries where the lime stone was plentiful and of good quality. Steep cliffs overhanging deep water made it easier for ships to come close to land to be loaded with the cooked lime.
As late as the early sixties, people found newspapers on the walls of some of the cabins that was written in a strange language. Ellen Winter and her father, James Winter, went to visit a woman named Marian Woolston on San Juan Island who used to cook for the quarry workers when she was young. She told them the men were from Serbia.
Tom Welsch, an Orcas historian came to talk to the class and filled us in on what the workers lives were like. The workers were brought here by labor brokers who rounded up people in Europe who needed a job and delivered them to quarry owners. At that time, it was illegal to bring in Chinese people to work.
The workers lives were hard. They broke rock, moved rock, burned rock or cut firewood for the kilns that burned every day all day. Men pushed heavy ore carts along rail tracks and dumped them into chutes that slid the rocks into the top of the kiln. The kiln burned 4 cords a day seven days a week. A man could chop one cord and a half of wood a day. Their pay was $1.50 a day. Most workers were single men. According to Welsch, only the quarry foreman and the quarry owners had their families there. Many workers died in the quarries all over the islands, crushed by fallen rocks. Stokers had to breathe smoke and toxic fumes from kilns. Most of the men never returned home. The ones that did, were old men in their thirties.
We weren’t able to find any photographs of Ocean. There are very few records that it even existed. We tried to piece together a picture of what life was like there by looking at the things that they left. We imagine that the men ate a lot of meat due to the numerous large cut bones that looked like they came from oxen. Next to the ruins of some little cabins, it appears that people had made rock gardens. There are even the remains of a little picket fence. We found stove parts and old boots and a washtub and pieces of kerosene lanterns. We found a complete enamel plate, parts of pocket watch. A broken cut glass pitcher made us think there must have been women there. We found a log platform that must have been connected to where the dock used to be.
The town was probably abandoned around the beginning of the first world war. Maybe, as indicated in a geological report, the steep slopes prohibited the further mining of lime. The limekiln operation may have closed due to roads and less expensive processes on the mainland. Mrs. Woolston said that many Serbs were put into internment camps along with Germans since they were now considered enemies.
Now the buildings at Ocean, Washington have mostly rotted away. All that is left of this busy town are some old pieces of metal and a crumbling lime kiln. Standing on this ledge we can almost hear the kaboom of dynamite, the sounds of pickaxes and rock drills, the squeaking of ore cars along their tracks and the sawing and splitting of wood. We admire these people who lived such a rugged life and worked so hard but we kind of wish they had never come because of the destruction they caused on our island.
Authors:
Bullock, Kajetan
Miller, Henry
Winter, Ellen
Vekved, Nathan
Sources of Information
Marion Woolston
James Winter
Ellen Winter
Tom Welsch
The Helsell family
The Orcas Museum
Travel Chanel, Mystery at the Museum, The Great Seattle Fire
Historylink.org
University of Washington Publications in Geology “The Geology of the San Juan Islands” Mineral Resources
Orcas Historical Society and Museum, Images of America – Orcas Island, Acadia 2007