Million Fish A Year Went Through Everett Cannery

It's hard to imagine that in the early days Everett's waterfront was an energetic mix of lumber and shingle mills, fish canneries, docks, tugboats and log booms.

This photograph is of the early wire-nail factory that, by the time of my arrival, had been converted to a busy cannery. So busy that they processed 1 million salmon in just one season.

I remember so well going down the path to the beach, past the first Weyerhaeuser lumber mill in the state, to where that cannery stood.

The building itself stood on pilings. This was good and bad. The good part was that the cannery had little or no problems with disposal of fish scraps. The bad part was the waste simply fell on the beach and when the tide was low the cannery smelled bad.

One historic year in the early 1920s the fish came into Puget Sound in large numbers. They swam into the Strait of Juan de Fuca, then some split off north toward Vancouver and the mouth of the Fraser River. The rest turned south and came down Admiralty Inlet to the south end of Whidbey Island, where some continued on toward Seattle and the Duwamish Waterway. The rest turned back toward Everett and the Snohomish River.

The two owners of that cannery were Samuel P. McGhie and John O. Morris. They had started up business in 1913 with another partner named S. Chase Jr. and operated under the name of Everett Packing Co. The young city had a second salmon cannery run by a Capt. Ramwell, who was also the tugboat king of the Everett waterfront.

This young partnership was 'way ahead of its time. They also had one of the first floating canneries in Bristol Bay and the prized red salmon of Alaska.

Morris and McGhie also had a herring-reduction plant in Canada, another cannery on the west coast of Vancouver Island, a clam cannery on Queen Charlotte Island, a pea-canning plant near Mount Vernon. All this plus the floating cannery and the Everett plant gave them nearly a $2.5 million gross sale each year and employment to nearly 2,000 men during the busy season.

Those were days when a young boy like me could go down to the main dock at Pier 3 and fish for bright silver salmon off the pier using a natural gut line and a small herring or candlefish for bait. The water was crystal-clear in those days; you could see the fish swimming by on their way to the mouth of the Snohomish River, the crabs walking along the bottom, and the starfish as they made their way up pilings to feed on mussels.

Memories like these come to mind when you read the run of "humpies" and a good showing of silver salmon are delighting the sports fishermen who work the salt chuck on their favorite spot offshore at a place locally named "Humpy Hollow." It isn't hollow at all, but is a place where the two currents caused by tidal changes that makes for good feeding for the collected salmon.

This was a good year for sports fishermen . . . though by no stretch of the imagination could the 1 million fish of that famous past season in the early 1920s be reached.

"On the Main Line," Robert Humphrey's column about the history of South Snohomish County, appears occasionally in Snohomish Life.