32 January . 2016

33 January . 2016

By Marianne Scott

Discover

AnAcortesa Blend of Modern convenience and puBlic art

MakeS anacorteS a delightful deStination

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Christopher s. teren/terenphotography.Com

34 January . 2016

35 January . 2016

this community who died at sea while in pursuit of their livelihood.”

Dale Fowler, Cap Sante’s harbour-master, enthusiastically explained why Anacortes’ marina is a great destination. “It’s right downtown in the middle of ev-erything. Slips from 16 to 133 feet. Up to 100-amp power. It’s convenient for pick-ing up guests. We have a supermarket, marine store, even a shuttle to Sea-Tac Airport. Mexican, Japanese, Thai and pizza restaurants. Pub fare and a micro-brewery. The lowest fuel prices in the re-gion. Fresh fish and prawns in the sum-mer. Dock-wide free wifi and free bikes for registered guests. We were the busi-est marina in Washington with 16,000 boat nights in 2015. But we’ll find you a spot 99 percent of the time.”

Historical anacortes Walking Anacortes’ streets requires frequent stops, starting with the tall, perforated sculpture next to the harbourmaster’s office. One side depicts Annie Curtis in her Victorian garb; the other portrays fish, a paddle and tri-master. The W.T. Preston, now dry-berthed, is located at the harbour’s north side. Constructed in 1929, the 50-metre stern-wheeled snagboat toiled in Puget Sound’s rivers to remove tangled trees and deadheads creating navigational hazards. She’s a National Historic Landmark and serves as a museum. The 1911 railway station—now a community centre—is nearby and displays the first of more than 150 his-toric murals that make this town one of a kind. On summer Saturdays, the station hosts a farmers market.

Anacortes’ history resembles many towns in the region. Like Bellingham and Port Townsend, the town’s found-ers wanted to make Anacortes the “New York of the West” by building a railroad terminus here. Tacoma won that compe-tition and Anacortes lost many of its res-idents during the subsequent recession, a slowdown that lingered for decades. The upside is that many of the town’s charming historic buildings escaped the wrecking ball and now house businesses and restaurants. Anacortes again thrived by building wood-product mills and be-coming a large centre for fish process-ing. It called itself the “salmon canning capital of the world,” a claim also made by Alaska’s Ketchikan, and Oregon’s Astoria. In 1913, the canneries tinned 800,000 cases of fish. But a 1913 landslide into the Fraser River’s Hell’s Gate Can-yon so disrupted salmon runs that not

e reacHed anacortes after sailing through a flock of Spanish names—San Juan Island, Guemes Island and Channel, Fidal-

go and Lopez islands, Rosario Strait and Padilla Bay—left in the 1770s by Spanish explorer Francisco Eliza and his crew. But the town of Anacortes was named after Annie Curtis, who arrived in 1879 to homestead the “scarcely populated wilderness together with her husband Amos Bowman and other pioneers…” Amos added a Spanish twist to Annie’s name—probably to intermingle with the other Spanish monikers in the region.

We sailed Beyond the Stars, our Hanse 411, between Fidalgo Bay’s day beacons and entered Cap Sante Marina, a large, well maintained enterprise with 950 us-able slips and up to 200 berths for visit-ing yachts. The harbour is divided into sections for pleasure craft and work-boats, with fishing and tour boats locat-ed on the south quays.

The French appellation, Cap Santé, means “Cape Health” and is named in honour of Annie Curtis’ memories of her visits to her many Quebec relatives in the St. Lawrence River town of Cap Santé.

Be prepared to get your land legs back after cruising: a broad paved esplanade surrounds Cap Sante. Colourful waste

receptacles imitating tins of one-pound canned salmon line the walkway, attest-ing to the significance of the 11 canner-ies that once hogged Guemes Channel. The reproduced labels show that product marketing has a long history: red pre-dominates to imply the contents’ fleshy colour. They include such brands as, “Tug-boat Salmon Select Pink,” “Tulip Brand Pink,” and “Canoe Brand Red Salmon.”

The esplanade passes in front of the beautifully landscaped Anthony’s Res-taurant that offers good fare at excellent prices, especially during happy hour. Along the waterfront, jaunty red tables and chairs invite passersby to sit, play chess, watch birds and yachts and ob-serve the many folks walking their dogs. It’s a far cry from the scene a century ago when the harbour was lined with lumber- and sawmills, shingle mills and pulp, plywood and veneer mills.

Continue strolling along the footpath and you’ll pass the commercial vessel area. At the end looking out over the harbour, a bronze sculpture of a woman and a toddler by Deborah Copenhaver, “Lady of the Sea,” is “dedicated to those who work and play in the sea, and the families and friends who wait for them.” Nearby is a cenotaph for those whose families waited forever. The plaque reads “. . . the citizens of Anacortes erect-ed this memorial in honor of those from

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Marine Supply & Hardware Company

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Antique stores abound in Anacortes.

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top: Larjon/Dreamstime.Com; right: marianne sCott

36 January . 2016

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only the Fraser’s canneries were slowed or closed, the slide also affected regional canneries. Hydroelectric dams, over-fishing and pollution added to salmon shortages and most canneries moved to Alaska—they also closed later on.

strolling downtown I strolled west along 8th Street and ogled a strik-ing house showing off green, red and gold Croatian traditional decorations. Down the street, the Anacortes Museum informed me that so many Croatians had emigrated here, curator Bret Lun-sford had written a coffee table book, Croatian Fishing Families of Anacortes. The museum occupies the former public li-brary funded by steel magnate Andrew Carnegie. The 1909 building is small but the museum has put 20,000 historic pho-tos and archives online for anyone to ac-cess. Amos and Annie Bowman’s 1891 house is located at 1815 8th Street.

On the same street, block-sized Caus-land Memorial Park with a stone-mo-saic gazebo, commemorates local sol-diers fallen in the two world wars and the Korean and Vietnamese conflicts. Undeterred by past horrors, a group of carefree school children were playing a boisterous game. From there I walked west to Commercial Street, the heart of Anacortes. I stopped by the visitors cen-tre on Commercial and 9th and found several guides including the “Walking Tour of Downtown Historic Anacortes,” and a city map listing the murals dot-ting city walls.

anacortes’ Murals More than 150 murals by artist Bill Mitchell adorn the walls of the mostly late 19th and early 20th century buildings. Bill’s murals,

painted on two-centimetre plywood, depict some of Anacortes’ past (and present) citizens, merchants, entertain-ers and crooks—even some fictional characters. Some portray a single per-son; others incorporate several figures and their businesses. All of them tell a piece of the town’s story. It’s a history lesson in images.

An astonishing fact about Bill Mitchell is that his disability (a car accident put him in a wheelchair) has not kept him from making huge contributions to his beloved hometown. In the 1980s, he was part of the Anacortes Renaissance and Revival Confederation, a group looking for a way to keep the downtown from becoming a ghost town—a fate befalling

many North American municipalities. Bill became its champion. He unveiled his first mural—“Fred White and his 1891 safety bike”—in 1984.

The murals are privately sponsored. A family, business, the city or service club might bring an ancestor’s portrait or a photo of an enterprise. Bill and his crew project the image onto the ply-wood, outline the figures and cut out the overall shape. Bill applies several layers of paint for durability and often includes period automobiles to impart historical context. After the mural’s back is sealed, it’s affixed to one of the town’s brick or lapstrake walls. When you walk up Commercial, be sure to peek around the corners; many murals are located on the side streets. Thus we find Ole Olsen shovelling snow; two women holding a parasol while riding their donkey cart; a couple and their baby standing out-side the Anacortes Stage and Taxi Co., which also proclaims it’s a “Licenced Carrier and Bootleg Cab;” a family with eight kids driving off in their sky blue 1910 Model T Ford (no seatbelts or baby seats). Bill Mitchell himself is portrayed in a 1954 Autoette electric cart.

The murals have contributed mightily to keeping the town alive. Shops abound and traffic is brisk. Bill believes the mu-rals have energized the business sector and raised local pride. Restaurants, an-tique stores, a bead store, bookstores, clothing shops—if you’re looking for re-tail therapy, look no further.

MV Preston, once a paddlewheel snag boat,

is now a museum.

Some of Anacortes’ many murals that recall the town’s history.

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grandson, Steve. I asked Rick Sohm, who’s worked here for years, how they find bits in such a cornucopia of supplies. “Oh, we locate everything eventually,” he said, grinning. The store no longer has a website, so if you need any possible part for your boat, or enjoy immersing your-self in 92 years worth of boat parts, you’ll have to drop by. You’ll be enthralled.

tHe town crier You might get all your news from Facebook or Twitter, but before electronics and texting became rampant, towns hired criers to get out the word. The call, “Oyez, oyez”—the old French for “Hear, hear”—would resound

Getting peckish, I stopped for a crispy slice at Village Pizza and then continued enjoying the avenue’s embellishments. A lawn chair supporting a supine skeleton carried the sign, “He was waiting for his wife in the yarn shop.”

Many of Anacortes’ historic build-ings have been preserved and updated. Rounded windows and Romanesque architectural features are common. One of those buildings with rounded arches was born in 1890 as the Wilson Hotel but now offers affordable housing. Its concrete-faced sidewall shows a pointil-list mosaic of Annie Curtis by artist Lisa Liedgren. The Island Café is housed in a Romanesque, beautifully painted vintage building. The Majestic Inn and Spa found a home in the McNaught Building, con-structed in 1891. The edifice has served as a hotel, a retail store, business offices and school. In 2001, a cat knocked over a space heater triggering a disastrous fire, but the burnt-out shell was rebuilt. It’s a welcom-ing place for guests to stay while awaiting your arrival at the dock.

tHe Marine supply & Hardware Company To reach this boaters’ and handyman’s paradise, you must continue striding up Commercial Avenue to 2nd Street. On the outside wall a huge image of the company’s founder with his 1918 “Anacortes Junk Co.” truck graces the wall. It was one of the first murals and brought visitors to the north end of the avenue.

It’s a huge place with hidden bays and outbuildings. I was captured by shelves upon shelves loaded with fishermen’s caps—in leather, wool and cotton. Sec-ond-hand boating stuff abounded. Do you want to replace an alcohol stove? Can you use a brass diving helmet? Add to your ship model, pelorus or sextant collection?

While I wandered about the maze, a black cat slinked across my shins. It con-trols mouse invasions. Duck decoys were next to a bunch of Chinese-made plastic gizmos. Floor-to-ceiling wooden shelves stored a zillion boxes with metal parts and a thousand cubbyholes were filled with everything galvanized—lug bolts, nuts, nails, valves and fasteners of every kind.

Mike Demopoulos, a Greek immigrant, who arrived from Greece in the early 20th century, built his fortune on junk, collect-ing other people’s trash and selling it. Success got him a loan and he founded the marine store to serve the fishing in-dustry. The Anacortes Junk Co. building is still part of the store that now takes up most of a block and is managed by Mike’s

It may take a while, but eventually you will find whatever you are looking for at the Marine Supply & Hardware.

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and the crier, a reporter and social net-worker rolled into one, would call out news, royal edicts, laws and public an-nouncements.

Richard Riddell, a champion town crier dressed in the sartorial splendour befit-ting his station, comes to the Cap Sante docks on Saturday afternoons and cries out all the news that’s fit to hear.

When planning to visit Anacortes, portofanacortes.com gives the info you need for moorage. For a calendar of events, see anacortes.org/visit-anacortes. m

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