Qualla: Clallam Bay, Washington

Clallam Bay, Washington: Introduction

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On April 1, 1905, a keeper lit a lamp at Slip Point for the first time. There was no tower to put it in. Congress had funded a light and a fog signal for this corner of the Strait of Juan de Fuca but not the structure to hold them, so a lantern bolted to the front of a plain wooden building did the job for the next decade. April Fool's Day is an odd date to begin warning ships off a rocky point, and sailors on the strait might have appreciated the joke. They also understood the need. Sixty miles of unlit water lay between the lights at Cape Flattery and Ediz Hook, and Clallam Bay sat almost exactly in the middle of the gap.

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Clallam Bay, Washington: A Lamp on April Fool's Day

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Congress appropriated $12,500 in June 1900 for the light and fog signal, and the wooden station building went up in 1904. The keeper's residence followed in 1905, the same year the lamp was first lit, and a proper light tower did not arrive until 1916. A simpler tower replaced th...

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Clallam Bay, Washington: Bark, Boom, and Bust

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Clallam Bay began in the 1880s as a steamboat stop, a place where a vessel could take on freight and passengers between somewhere and somewhere else. It became a mill town in 1890. Two years later the mill burned, and the community pivoted to making barrels, because barrels were ...

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Clallam Bay, Washington: The Bridge Over Charlie Creek

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Between 1902 and 1907, the logger D.A. Robinson worked the hills behind Clallam Bay and built a railroad to move what he cut. To cross Charlie Creek he raised a timber trestle 808 feet long and 202 feet high, which at the time was reckoned the longest railroad bridge in the world...

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Clallam Bay, Washington: Twin Towns on a Cold Strait

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Sekiu Point, the western cape of the bay, was first charted by Captain Henry Kellett in 1847. The town behind it was founded as West Clallam in 1870 by A.J. Martin, who put up a salmon cannery to be nearer the fishing grounds, and it is now called Sekiu -- pronounced "See'-kew," ...

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