Brief History of Jetty Island

[Thomas W Murphy]

Students in the Summer 2008 LEAF School will have a chance to assist me with an ethnographic study of Jetty Island. This is an unusual project for a field school because anthropologists do not typically study people on an uninhabited island. Yet, the story of jetty is a compelling one in which humans play a vital role as the brief history outlined below demonstrates.


Find more photos like this on Edmonds Community College
Brief Summary of Jetty Island History
Thomas W. Murphy
May 6, 2008

More than 50,000 people annually come to a two-mile long, man-made island in Everett, Washington to relax on sandy beaches, wade in warm and shallow water, join guided nature hikes, watch wildlife, kayak around the perimeter and kite board with steady afternoon winds. Jetty Island is recognized today as one of Snohomish County’s top recreational and wildlife resources but if the founders of Everett had achieved their goals then the riprap jetty would have more closely resembled Seattle’s Harbor Island.

In 1892, Henry Hewitt, Jr., representing John D. Rockefeller’s holdings in the Everett Land Company, proposed the construction of a freshwater harbor in Port Gardner Bay at the mouth of the Snohomish River. The original proposal called for the construction of a riprap bulkhead or training dike that would divert the freshwater from the Snohomish River to the south around the Everett peninsula and into Possession Sound. Spoils from dredging a deepwater channel between the bulkhead and Everett’s shoreline would be deposited on the west side of the bulkhead to provide fill and support the construction of a road connecting a line of wharfs that extended to the west and south from Smith Island in the Snohomish delta. A series of locks and dams would have isolated the freshwater from tidal influence and enhanced navigational access to an industrial waterfront in Everett.

A financial panic in 1893 led Rockefeller to withdraw his financial support and delayed construction of the bulkhead until 1896 when construction finally began with federal funding under the auspices of the Army Corps of Engineers. Repair, reinforcement and extension of the original dike continued in the years to follow but competition from Seattle for Corps funds and poor design undermined the project from its inception. The locks and dams anchoring the freshwater harbor were never constructed and the river’s heavy sediment load required regular dredging to maintain a navigation channel through the harbor. The training dike would be breached in 1903, reconnected to Smith Island in 1912, and breached again in 1921. Meanwhile the Corps continued to deposit dredge spoils west of the bulkhead creating the land mass that would make up today’s Jetty Island.

The Port of Everett gained ownership of the dike, dredge spoils and nearby tidelands in 1929. Planners for the Port and the City of Everett continued to draw and redraw plans for the industrialization of the jetty well into the 1970s. Potential recreational uses of the island began gaining favor in 1965 when the Kiwanis club built a sun shelter and the city initiated and then abandoned ferry service to the island first in 1965 and then again in 1968. Sedimentation and tides hampered the first effort at establishing a ferry and bad weather and the threat of a lawsuit from a woman in high heels who had fallen on the island undermined the second effort.

During the 1960s the discovery of the beached Equator, a ship on which Robert Louis Stevenson had sailed and written, drew the attention of the people of Everett. They led efforts to extract the historic boat from the sand and move it to the mainland for public display. By the end of the decade citizen protest led to the cessation of indiscriminate deposits of dredge spoils on the island. In 1975 the Everett Herald began using the name “Jetty Island” and the use of the island for recreation and wildlife conservation was eclipsing industrial plans.

Everett’s 4th of July Association moved fireworks to the island in 1983 but a shell backfired and fire broke out in 1985. That same year, Everett Parks reinstated ferry service to the island. In the following year the City initiated “Jetty Island Days” between July 5th and Labor Day. 25,000 people visited the island between 1986 and 1990. During this time the Port worked collaboratively with community groups to develop plans for beneficial uses of clean dredge spoils on the island. These efforts resulted in the construction of a 1,500 foot protective berm for a 15 acre mud flat in 1989 and 1990. Subsequent dredging, once again occurring on a regular basis, has replenished the berm, suppressed scotch broom and extended the island further to the south.

Since that time recreational uses of the island have grown. Long a favorite of boaters and kayakers summer ferry service has extended access to swimmers, waders, bird watchers and those who like to relax on the beach. In the last decade kite boarders have discovered the afternoon winds they call the “steady jetty.” Kite boarding is an extreme sport that combines surfing with kiting to allow athletes to skim the water and fly through the air. They claim that Jetty Island is one of the top two locations on the west coast for kite boarding and dozens of kites can be seen flying above jetty on a summer afternoon.

Today’s Jetty Island is not only a top tourist destination but also a wildlife conservation area. Its sandy beaches, mud flat and salt water marshes provide important habitat not as readily available elsewhere in Snohomish River delta. It supports an abundance of wildlife, including bald eagles, Chinook salmon, osprey, bull trout, and blue heron. In fact, observers have identified 115 species of birds in the vicinity of the island.

Everett’s treasured island may not have realized the potential envisioned by city founders but it stands in sharp contrast to Seattle’s Harbor Island, an industrialized and toxic Superfund site.