Living History -- An Old-Timer's View Of Port Townsend

PORT TOWNSEND - This might be a tad hard to believe. But last month, an 88-year-old retired businesswoman and her best driving buddy kidnapped me so they could show me a good time in this old Victorian seaport city.

"We love this place," declared Gussie Lester, as we "raced" around town at 20 mph. She's lived in Port Townsend since 1911 when her mother moved the family from Wisconsin.

It's a good thing Lester and her friend Lynne Sterling took me for a ride in Port Townsend and the nearby Fort Worden State Park. Otherwise, I would have missed all the fine details.

Port Townsend is not the kind of place travelers should speed through. Nope. If you step on the accelerator too hard, you're liable to miss all the delicious, historical tidbits, not to mention you'll be at the other end of town in seconds.

You need to slow down in Port Townsend, a place haunted by its past and cheered by its present. The National Historic Register has listed it as one of only three Victorian seaports in the country. Many of its popular festivals and community events draw on this heritage and use the town's historic landmarks as venues.

"This is a funny and funky place," said Sterling, the owner of the Holly Hill House B&B in Port Townsend and the co-chair of the town's third annual Victorian Festival, which begins next Wednesday. The festival is a four-day celebration of Port Townsend's Victorian roots.

"You never know who you're going to sit down next to in a tavern," she says. "It could be someone counter culture or a corporate CEO dropout."

Sterling is a corporate dropout herself. Once a senior mortgage lending officer, she found herself purchasing the B&B in 1993. And though she had no previous experience in the hospitality industry, she traded her rate sheets for bed sheets.

Now every morning at 9 a.m. Sterling shares breakfast with her guests and tells the story of how parts of Port Townsend became frozen in time.

Once a sparkling seaport, Port Townsend grew rapidly in the late 1800s with the hopes that a railroad link with the Columbia River would be built and that the town's burgeoning harbor would be the key to the Orient. Port Townsend leaders had dubbed their town "The City of Dreams" because they believed it was going to be the most prosperous city in the West Coast.

They banked on the town's success and began building. Up went the courthouse with its 100-foot clock tower. Next came the custom house and a sprawling post office. The wealthy built Victorian mansions with the finest material shipped from around the world. The town ballooned in population to 8,000. Anticipation was in the air.

But when the Union Pacific Railroad failed to build the railroad link and a deep economic funk hit the nation, the town tumbled hard and everything went bust, including most of the people.

Some of the newly built downtown buildings never opened. Boarded up, they sat dormant and remained that way for close to seven decades. The Victorian houses were carved into apartments or simply abandoned. Many families stayed, but hundreds left and a depressed economy kept people away until Fort Worden, a military coastal base, was established in 1902 and the lumber mill opened in 1927.

An apt description for some parts of Port Townsend would have been a living ghost town. During the 1950s and 1960s, the population stood still at 5,000 people. While other cities and towns in Washington demolished their old buildings, the Victorians stayed standing in Port Townsend in a state of what historians call benign neglect.

"People were too poor to finish the buildings or tear them down," Sterling says.

As we snailed along Water Street, Port Townsend's main drag, my guides pointed out assorted beauties with their decorated cornices, majestic windows and stone facades. We then made our way past the Victorian mansions, many of which have been converted into B&Bs. (Next week's Victorian Festival will feature tours of the inns in town.)

The houses are really history books, each room a frilly laced page. There lived the benevolent, the eccentric, the snotty, the bawdy and the crazy.

We dropped by the Holly Hill House, a place Lester remembers fondly. Her mother had catered numerous dinners, teas and luncheons for Billie and Lizette Hill, who had owned Holly Hill House. Colonel R.C. Hill, Billie's father, built Holly Hill House in 1872.

Billie Hill was the town's haberdasher. He dressed, of course, like he owned the store. He married Lizette, labeled a "foreigner" because she was from Chicago. The couple threw some of the town's classiest parties.

Lester remembers those good days and also the bad, when families picked up and left the Victorian homes behind when the economy soured. As she walked to school, she passed by the now lovingly-tended mansions that no one had wanted.

"I knew they were historic back then," Lester says. "They're even more so now."