< Browse to Previous Essay | Browse to Next Essay >

Armed posse moves the Clallam County seat from New Dungeness to Port Angeles on November 10, 1890.

HistoryLink.org Essay 7587 : Printer-Friendly Format

On November 10, 1890, a posse of Port Angeles residents moves the Clallam County seat to their home town from New Dungeness, where it has been located since the county was created in 1854. The move comes six days after Port Angeles prevails over New Dungeness and Port Crescent in a three-way vote for the courthouse. From 1890 on, Port Angeles is the civic, commercial, and industrial center of Clallam County while its two rivals are soon all but abandoned.

New Dungeness

When the Washington Territorial Legislature created Clallam County in 1854, most of the few non-Indian settlers lived near a sheltered harbor created by a long, narrow sand spit extending more than five miles into the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The small community was called New Dungeness after the harbor and spit (now just Dungeness Spit), which British Royal Navy Captain George Vancouver (1757-1798) named in 1792 for a similar promontory in the English Channel.

In an 1860 election, the first recorded in Clallam County, voters placed the county seat at "Whiskey Flat," a small, level area below the bluff overlooking Dungeness Harbor just west of the mouth of the Dungeness River. Within a few years, the seat was moved up to the bluff where most of New Dungeness was developing. On July 24, 1865, early settlers Elliott and Margaret Cline platted a townsite there and deeded two lots to the county. There, the first courthouse and jail were constructed. Elliott Cline was Clallam County's first representative in the Territorial legislature and held various county offices.

Boom Years

Port Angeles, farther west along the Strait of Juan de Fuca, was also located on a harbor created by a long sand spit (Ediz Spit). A small hamlet until the late 1880s, it began to grow when it was chosen as the site of the Puget Sound Co-operative Colony, a short-lived utopian experiment that brought hundreds of idealistic settlers, who stayed on in Port Angeles.

The late 1880s and early 1890s were boom years for the Northwest, driven in part by prospects for transcontinental railroad service. Nearly every settlement in Clallam County and the rest of Washington expected to be a railroad stop if not the terminus of a transcontinental line. Port Angeles boosters saw their city as the obvious terminal point, but they had a rival in Port Crescent, located still farther west along the strait on the shore of Crescent Bay. Port Crescent was a thriving logging community in 1888 when the Port Crescent Improvement Company laid out a townsite of 166 blocks in anticipation of the railroad's arrival.

Although Port Crescent and Port Angeles were booming, New Dungeness was not, in part because the inner harbor where it was located behind Cline Spit (which projects out from the shore toward the larger Dungeness Spit) was silting up, making it harder for ships, the primary means of transportation, to reach the town.

In 1890, Port Crescent and Port Angeles interests convinced the county commissioners to put the county seat location up for a vote. Both waged spirited campaigns. Port Angeles businesses and citizens pledged $5,700 to the county for a courthouse site and building. The Port Crescent Improvement Company responded by offering a $5,000 check and property worth $3,000, which the Port Angeles newspapers (somewhat inconsistently) denounced as a bribe. New Dungeness made little effort. When the votes cast on November 4, 1890, were counted, Port Angeles had 687, Port Crescent 293 (some sources say 297), and New Dungeness only seven.

"Brave Men, Tried and True"

On Saturday, November 8, the county commissioners decreed that Port Angeles would be the county seat as of November 10. The next day, Sheriff Samuel G. Morse (1859-1921) and deputies Frank P. Fisher and Willard Brumfield led an armed force from the victorious city to New Dungeness. The Port Angeles Times, quoted by G. M. Lauridsen and A. A. Smith in their 1937 history of the city, recounted:

"Five and twenty brave men, tried and true ... went up to see that the removal was done properly and with eclat ... The county officials had requested that wagons and help be sent them in the removal, so the army was accompanied by three ambulance wagons" (Lauridsen, 90).

"The facts were that there was no way to get to Dungeness and back in one day, so the boys decided to put in the night before in getting there, and take a chance on getting back over the corduroy trail with their ambulances next day. ... [In addition to Morse and his deputies] the rest of the gang comprising the 'committee' was anyone who could find a horse and was fond of a lark; matches and old-fashioned lanterns were the only means of illuminating a November night in the forests; liquids that illuminate but do not come out of creeks were an essential part of the equipment, and there you are! -- a perfect setup for a perfectly good night out" (Lauridsen, 91).

The posse was met cordially by Smith Troy, a New Dungeness resident and county political leader then serving as auditor, who had all the records and equipment organized and helped load the ambulance wagons. Starting out about 7:30 a.m. on November 10, 1890, the cavalcade reached Port Angeles around four that afternoon. According to the Times:

"They drove into town amidst the greatest of enthusiasm. The horsemen had decorated themselves with evergreens, and with flags waving and wild cheering they rode through the town. Mayor John Dyke headed the cavalcade and made a speech, recounting the exploits of the army, and congratulating the people on the happy termination of the campaign" (Lauridsen, 91).

Sources:
G. M. Lauridsen and A. A. Smith, The Story of Port Angeles, Clallam County, Washington (Seattle: Lowman and Hanford, 1937), 14-15, 89-93; Paul J. Martin, Port Angeles, Washington: A History (Port Angeles: Peninsula Publishing, 1983), 58-61; Jimmy Come Lately: History of Clallam County, ed. by Jervis Russell (Port Angeles: Clallam County Historical Society, 1971), 30-31, 108-09.

By Kit Oldham, December 29, 2005

Travel through time (chronological order):
< Browse to Previous Essay | Browse to Next Essay >

Related Topics: Cities & Towns | Counties |

Licensing: This essay is licensed under a Creative Commons license that encourages reproduction with attribution. Credit should be given to both HistoryLink.org and to the author, and sources must be included with any reproduction. Click the icon for more info. Please note that this Creative Commons license applies to text only, and not to images. For more information regarding individual photos or images, please contact the source noted in the image credit.

Major Support for HistoryLink.org Provided By: The State of Washington | Patsy Bullitt Collins | Paul G. Allen Family Foundation | Museum Of History & Industry | 4Culture (King County Lodging Tax Revenue) | City of Seattle | City of Bellevue | City of Tacoma | King County | The Peach Foundation | Microsoft Corporation, Other Public and Private Sponsors and Visitors Like You