Charles E. Coon was one of the best-known men in Washington state: a mayor, lieutenant governor, acting governor, legislator, Civil War veteran, and Acting Secretary of the Treasury of the United States. Yet today, almost no one remembers him. This essay asks how a life of such consequence could fade so completely from community memory.

This essay continues the story begun in “Uncle Charlie” (Essay VIII), which introduced Coon and his connection to the Adams Pragge House. New readers can begin here, though those interested in the full story may wish to read Essay VIII, as well.

Where does water arrive in a house built in 1889?

At the Adams Pragge House, it arrives at the back.

The plumbing rises through the rear of the house to the upstairs bathroom. The later addition, built during Charles Coon’s ownership, extends from the back wall. The windows on that side face northeast across Uptown rooftops, over the bluff at Chetzemoka Park, and out across Admiralty Inlet toward Whidbey Island and the distant Cascades.

This also is the sunrise side of the house, and on the morning this essay is published — the summer solstice — first light began to gather in that direction shortly after 3:30 a.m., with proper sunrise finally arriving at 5:10 a.m.

When Charles Coon bought this house in 1907, city water had been flowing into Port Townsend for barely a year. The system that supplied it — the Olympic Gravity Water System—had been one of the defining projects of his administration as mayor. Water traveled from Snow Creek in the Olympic foothills through roughly twenty miles of pipe before arriving in town.

We only learned that Coon owned the house when we discovered a 1910 permit application connecting it to city water.

That discovery led to another.

Once we started looking, we found Charles Edward Coon’s name seemingly everywhere.

Mayor of Port Townsend. Lieutenant Governor of Washington. Acting Governor of Washington. Acting Secretary of the Treasury of the United States.

Charles Coon left a large paper trail, in newspapers across the country, legislative journals, campaign literature, government records, and obituary notices. And analyzing the record from the vantage point of this house, and the years he spent here at the end of his life, one pattern is unmistakable: everywhere Charles Coon went, he seemed to find himself in positions of responsibility. He became president of organizations. He chaired committees. He managed businesses. He was entrusted with public money, public projects, and public institutions. He was repeatedly placed in charge of things that other people considered important.

He also built things: structure, systems, and in some cases, the very security upon which our country could prosper after the Civil War. But he isn’t memorialized anywhere. He isn’t even remembered.

Why?

Let’s begin at the bottom of the bluff. Downtown Port Townsend. Perhaps behind the counter, in the narrow, deep Bartlett Building storefront at 829 Water Street that extends back to the waterline.

For most of the years he lived in the house at what is now 1028 Tyler Street, Charles “Uncle Charlie” Coon was a grocer. He was president of the Port Townsend Mercantile Company, which the newspapers of the day called the leading business institution of the city, and which advertised itself as “The Sanitary Store” and as “Pure Food Purveyors.” The day-to-day of it was run by Charles A. Pragge — the husband of Coon’s niece, Helen, who shared this house with Coon and who we originally believed had been the house’s owner during this time — but the company was Coon’s, and so was its public character.

There is something the Mercantile Company’s advertisements in the Port Townsend Leader reveal about Coon and his values that the offices, articles, and obituaries do not. From an ad run in December of 1910:

“It’s correct and checks up all right. That is the way we do business — nothing missing, and no shortages.”

This man who had moved the debt of the United States through the banking houses of London advertised that, at his store, your change would be right. The smallness… the attention to detail… were the point.

In these years he also, repeatedly, served as president of the Washington State Grocers’ Association — by 1908 serving his fourth term — and a fixture at the grocers’ picnics and conventions up and down the Sound. This man kept the books, and he kept them clean, and he wanted the town to count on it.

Now let’s climb the bluff, because the next thing he built changed the city.

When Coon was mayor — and he was mayor of Port Townsend across the first decade of the century, and would be again a few years before the end of his life — Port Townsend did not own its water. The city bought its water from a private concern, the Spring Valley Water Company, which drew from a well near the pond at F Street and San Juan Avenue. By the turn of the century, the well could not keep pace with a city that still believed it was about to become great. In 1904, under one of Coon’s mayoral administrations, the city bought out the Spring Valley Water Company and built something new: a diversion on Snow Creek, through a wood-stave pipeline running some twenty miles down out of the foothills of the Olympics, carrying water to the town by gravity alone. Mayor Coon had traveled to Olympia with the city attorney and a representative of the quartermaster’s department at Fort Worden to appear before the state board of land commissioners and secure the financing for the project. He succeeded. The water system came into service in 1906 and had cost, by the reckoning of his later campaign literature, a quarter of a million dollars. One newspaper called it “the pride of every citizen.” When he died, his obituaries singled out this achievement above everything else he had done in the town:

“The Olympic Gravity Water System was built by the city, Mr. Coon being one of the foremost promoters of this worthy enterprise, whose wonderful success has justified the predictions.”

Coon helped take the town’s water out of private hands and make it a public thing — a system the city owned, that ran downhill into every house whether or not the household could have financed a well.

Water security can change the fortunes of a place.

In 1916, at the age of seventy-four, Coon ran for mayor again. His campaign filing statement said he was “bound to no party or faction,” having “relied solely upon my reputation for twenty years’ service to the citizens of Port Townsend.” He won, again, and took office in January 1917 for what his own inaugural address called the duties of mayor “for the fifth time.”

That March, a small notice from the Leader in the middle of a column about other things, revealed that

“The supply line of the Olympic Gravity Water System was recently broken and has been satisfactorily repaired by Superintendent Groves without difficulty, although the water is now coming to town with considerable pressure.”

The man who built the system, a decade on and in his seventies, was the mayor under whom its infrastructure started to show some age and its broken pipe got mended.

In another notice from the same period, we learn that the same mayor, in the same winter, was fielding this:

“A great many complaints have reached Mayor Coon of dogs howling at night, and in one case a sick lady has been very seriously disturbed.”

The dog tax was due. The dog catcher, the notice warned, would shortly be at work. And Charles Edward Coon — the man who had once signed, by one account, an average of four hundred United States Treasury warrants a day, representing nearly seven million dollars — was now seeing to it that a sick woman could sleep.

The water that comes to this house today is not Coon’s water. The system he championed served the town for twenty-two years — 1906 until 1928 — and then, eight years after his death, it was replaced. By then the paper mill and its much-needed jobs and industry had come, and the city had grown, and even Snow Creek could not supply the demand. So the city repeated Coon’s strategy but on a bigger scale, going after the Big and Little Quilcene rivers, and building a new diversion and a new wood stave pipeline now nearly thirty miles long. Over the following decades the wood stave would be replaced by welded steel. And so the water in my tap today descends from a different river, through a different pipe. What Coon actually built — the most concrete, most lasting-seeming thing of his career — was torn out and rebuilt past him within a decade of his death. The principle survived. The public ownership of Port Townsend’s water survived. The Olympic Gravity Water System name survived. But like so many things of the early Pacific Northwest hewn of the wood we had in such abundance, the works did not.

Step back once more, and the scale jumps.

The water and the dogs and the grocery were the work of a mayor. But in the very years he was doing all of these things, Charles Edward Coon was also the second-highest officer of the State of Washington.

He had been elected Lieutenant Governor in 1904 — the same year he travelled to Olympia to secure the funding for the water system. The Lieutenant Governorship made him the presiding officer of the State Senate, and whenever Governor Mead left the state, Coon was its acting executive.

A 1905 Seattle Star headline reads, “Charles Coon is governor of the state of Washington today.”

He held that power more than once, and headlines declaring the back-and-forth transitions of power from the Governor to Coon have a strange, almost pedestrian flatness to them compared to the long road to power transitions we experience today. In 1905, Governor Mead had gone to an out-of-state board meeting, and in his absence the small-city grocer became Washington’s chief executive. It happened again, and again when Governor Mead travelled to Washington, D.C., to see the President; the duties passing each time to Coon.

In May of 1908, while serving as Acting Governor, Coon came home to Port Townsend while in his official capacity as the acting head of the state, and the town turned out to welcome him. The man who built the water supply and the man who governed the state were, at that time, demonstrably the same man.

And he slept in this house.

The Senate, twice and unanimously, commended him as a presiding officer “of marked ability and fair and impartial manner.”

In 1908 Coon ran for a second term as Lieutenant Governor.

He lost the Republican nomination to a man named M.E. Hay. He did not believe the loss was clean, and he was right. Hay had won by paying newspapers for advertising, which was forbidden by the primary law. Coon said so, formally, to the State Senate, in a written protest in his own voice that survives in the Senate Journal of January 1909:

“I do therefore protest to your honorable body that said M.E. Hay is not eligible to said office ... and that I do continue to hold said office by reason thereof, and I do declare that I am ready and willing to perform the functions of said office.”

He took it to the Supreme Court, which dismissed him. In 1912 he ran for the office again, and he lost again. In 1914 — Hay by now having risen to the governorship — a Seattle paper laid the whole thing bare in an editorial that admitted what the courts had not been willing to act on: that the judges “had to admit in their decision that Hay OPENLY VIOLATED THE LAW IN SECURING HIS ELECTION,” but had let him keep the office because, they said, “THE PENALTY WAS TOO SEVERE.”

He was cheated out of the office, and he could not get it back, and the institution he had served so scrupulously declined to protect him from a man who had not served it scrupulously at all.

This didn’t stop Coon.

A Seattle paper, watching him surface yet again after another defeat, made a comparison that eventually became a touchstone:

“It has been very generally conceded that a cat has nine lives, and from the number of times Charles E. Coon bobs up after he has been put to sleep, the Coon, from a life standpoint, should be classed along with the cat.”

Coon took the joke and made it his own. A decade later, at seventy-six, having won a seat in the State House of Representatives, he gave an interview a Tacoma reporter headlined with his own words: “More Fights, More Cats, Says Veteran.” He served that 1919 session as one of Jefferson County’s two members, was placed on the Appropriations Committee — “one of the most sought-after committees in both houses,” the Leader noted with local pride — and was caricatured on the front pages of the Tacoma papers by two cartoonists in three days — both of them labeling the old man at his desk the same way: “Uncle Charley Coon of Port Townsend.”

He was, the papers agreed, the oldest of the old-timers, a man who had attended his first political convention at eighteen, in the Lincoln year.

He died the next winter, a sitting legislator.

And now we step back a final time, to the outermost ring, the one that ought to have made Charles Edward Coon impossible to forget but did not.

Before the grocery, before the water, before the state, there was the Treasury. Coon went into the Treasury Department in Washington, D.C., as a young man after the Civil War and rose inside it across more than twenty years, from bookkeeper to a position from which, by the campaign accounts of his later life, “more than one billion dollars passed through Mr. Coon’s hands.” The most consequential of that work was done in London. At the request of the Secretary of the Treasury, he crossed the Atlantic after the Civil War to refund the national debt — to convert the government’s high-interest bonds to lower ones. And on one such mission, during the Garfield administration, he “succeeded in refunding seventy-five million dollars at a great saving in interest,” and “Congress promptly recognized Mr. Coon’s services in this connection.”

A daily account from his Washington years gives the texture of it: he “signed an average of four hundred treasury warrants every day, representing nearly seven million dollars.”

In April of 1884 President Arthur named him Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, and the Senate confirmed him at once. When the Secretary fell ill that summer, Coon became the Acting Secretary of the Treasury of the United States. The machinery of federal finance moved under Coon’s signature. He was forty-two years old. His rulings in that office, one paper wrote, were “of such marked good sense as to attract the attention of the country, and inspire many strong appeals for his promotion to the Secretaryship.” From London, Sir Nathaniel Rothschild — a major political and philanthropic figure, and close friend of the future King Edward VII, he also would be the first Jewish person to be elevated to the British House of Lords as a peer — cabled the American government about Coon’s confirmation directly:

“Congratulate you and American Government on its excellent choice.”

But Coon did not keep the office long. When the administration changed in 1885 and a Democrat came into the Treasury, Coon — a Republican of, as one paper put it, “a very decided kind” — was asked to resign, and did, in a letter reprinted across the country that asserted, without bitterness, a “service of nearly twenty years in the Treasury, without the intervention or solicitation of a single politician.” He offered to go the moment he was asked, and he went. Years afterward a Washington paper still called him “one of the best financiers that ever occupied the office.”

Charles Edward Coon refinanced the debt of a nation. The bonds he converted matured and were paid and vanished into the ordinary functioning of the nation he served. The most consequential thing he ever did is also the most completely invisible.

The world does not build statues to the smooth functioning of a Loan Division.

Following his departure from the Treasury, he traveled twice to Europe on private financial business. He cruised the New England coast aboard the yacht of General William Tecumseh Sherman — the most famous living American soldier — and their excursion made the papers. In 1888, the Republicans of the Tenth New York congressional district nominated him to run against General Dan Sickles — a Civil War officer who had lost his leg at Gettysburg and gone on to serve as Minister to Spain — in a district that favored the Democratic name. Coon lost the race. He ran one thousand votes ahead of the Harrison presidential electors, outperforming the top of the Republican ticket in his own district, and losing to the larger name anyway.

He became briefly vice president and treasurer of a company promoting Elisha Gray’s telautograph, a device that transmitted handwriting over telegraph wire, whose backers called it “The Telephone’s Rival.” The company failed to become what its backers imagined.

Then, in 1895, he traveled west to visit his niece, Helen. She had married Charles Pragge and was, at the time, living in Tacoma. Coon liked what he found in the Pacific Northwest, and in 1897, he moved to Port Townsend. His niece and her family, as well as his sister Camilla, all would follow him there and would live with him in this house.

One thread that runs under all of it, from the first record to the last, is also visible in the oldest record.

The earliest document we have of Charles Coon, from March 1867, has nothing to do with finance or government. It records that the young men of Washington, D.C., had organized themselves into an association of baseball players — the sport then barely out of its cradle, not yet professional, still a thing gentlemen did in clubs — and that they had elected, as the president of the Empire Club, one Charles E. Coon.

He would later, in an 1892 article in the Washington Evening Star reminiscing about baseball’s “olden times,” be remembered as a “brilliant player.” In November of 1870, he was elected an Alternate Delegate to the National Base Ball Convention.

In 1869, he was a founding charter member of the Masons’ Pentalpha Lodge No. 23, alongside future president James A. Garfield. In November of 1872, he was elected M. E. high priest of the Masons’ Lafayette Chapter, No. 5.

From an early age, Charles Coon seemed to almost naturally find himself entrusted with leadership.

A deeper layer beneath even that was the Civil War. Coon had enlisted as a boy and served in the 23rd New York Volunteers as part of the First Corps in the Army of the Potomac. He was appointed 3rd Corporal April 27^th,1861 — a little more than a month after his 19^th birthday. His regiment saw considerable action. He fought at the second Battle of Bull Run, Fredericksburg, and Antietam. He was pulled from combat and promoted to deputy Army provost marshal for an area encompassing the southern part of New York State and was discharged for disability January 20^th, 1863. He carried that soldier in him the rest of his life: a leader in the Grand Army of the Republic, the presiding officer of its local post. He was vice president of the Society of the First Corps for the 1888 reunion in New York of the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia at Gettysburg. He marched with the veterans into his old age.

He died in Port Townsend in this house on January 8, 1920 — in his sleep, having suffered a paralytic stroke five days earlier. He was surrounded by his niece and her family.

The military command at Fort Worden — the army post guarding the mouth of this harbor less than a mile north of this house — ordered out its band and a detail of soldiers to carry him to the cemetery “as a mark of respect to the memory of a man who had served his country well, both as a soldier and as a high official under the government.”

According to the Leader, the Masonic Temple was filled to overflowing. Every prominent man in this part of the state attended his funeral. Then soldiers from Fort Worden carried the old soldier up to Laurel Grove Cemetery and put him in the ground. The loop that opened on a battlefield in 1861 closed on a hillside above Port Townsend fifty-nine years later, when men in uniform like he had worn, laid him to rest.

Coon’s life and public service deserve a book.

For today, let us simply return to where we started:

It’s May of 1908. He is the acting Governor of the State of Washington, and he has come home for the week. Port Townsend had turned out to welcome him. It is morning. He stands in a room at the back of the house, preparing for his day. Perhaps up before any others, observing the early light of dawn that I, too, watch and document in photos every morning a century later. He is, in that single moment and all at once, the grocer who keeps the change right, the mayor who built the water and minds the dogs, the presiding officer the Senate twice celebrated for his fairness, the acting Governor of the state, the man who once acted as Secretary of the Treasury of the United States, the young man who participated in the dawn of America’s pastime, and the boy who went to the war. It is all true at the same time, in the same man, in the third-floor room at the back of this house, where the water he championed and secured as a public good for his city flowed.

Port Townsend’s water runs from another river now. The bonds dissolved into the solvency of the country. The offices passed to other men. His Mercantile is gone. The name on his gravestone is not a title but an endearment. The city’s connection to the man who had done so much grew thinner with each generation.

The house where he lived stood at the intersection of streets named for a former president and for a man who had at one time been a political colleague — neither of whom ever set foot in or had anything to do with Port Townsend — and that remains true today.

Coon’s name appears nowhere.

But then, he did not spend his life building things to bear his name. He built things to serve the community.

A man who had held the whole scale of American public life — who had governed a state and steadied the Treasury — spent the last decades of that life making sure a small harbor town of six thousand had clean water, honest weights, and a quiet night’s sleep. He brought his largest capacities to the smallest stage and gave them undiminished.

The morning light broke softly this Summer Solstice, filtered through the maritime atmosphere, a blanket beyond which the Cascades hid, a massive presence, invisible but assured, in the distance.

*Sources for this essay include the Port Townsend Leader archives; the Journal of the Senate, State of Washington (1909); the Seattle Star, the Seattle Republican, the Tacoma Daily Ledger and News Tribune, the Spokane Spokesman-Review and Daily Chronicle, the New York Times and New York Sun, the Washington Post, the Washington. D.C. Evening Star, and the Buffalo Morning Express, accessed through Chronicling America (Library of Congress) and the Washington State Digital Archives; the records and history of the Olympic Gravity Water System published by the City of Port Townsend, Department of Public Works; and the collections of the Jefferson County Historical Society. Also Camp Fires of the Twenty-Third: Sketches of the Camp Life, Marches, and Battles of the Twenty-Third Regiment, N.Y.V., During the Term of Two Years in Service of the United States (New York: Davies & Kent, 1863).

Special thanks to Joseph Lavy, whose years of archival research into the history of the Adams Pragge House and its residents made this essay possible.

Zhenya Lavy writes The Turret Journal from within the Adams Pragge House, an 1889 Victorian in Port Townsend, Washington, where she and her husband serve as its stewards.

The Adams Pragge House is a three-suite bed and breakfast in Port Townsend, Washington. Learn more at adamspraggehouse.com.

→ https://adamspraggehouse.com

Related essays from The Turret Journal:

• Uncle Charlie: On Charles Coon and the Names a Town Keeps

• Two Letters By Her Name: Julia Yesler Benson Intermela and the Adams Pragge House

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We move through cities surrounded by names. Most of us never ask who they belonged to, why they were chosen, or why some endure while others disappear.

Port Townsend names its central downtown and uptown streets for US presidents, statesmen, generals, and national men. Starting from Washington Street downtown, which runs parallel to the aptly named Water Street, the grid rises Uptown through Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Quincy, and Monroe, to Jackson, Lincoln, Garfield, Taylor, Tyler, Roosevelt, Taft, Polk, Fillmore, Harrison, Pierce — names drawn from the architecture of American political memory and laid permanently into the city’s geography.

The Adams Pragge House stands on Tyler Street at the bend to F Street, and until the previous owner sold part of the property, the grounds also met the corner of Tyler and Blaine. James G. Blaine has been referred to as “The Magnetic Man” because of his stature as one of the most dominant statesmen of the late nineteenth century shaping America’s political agenda. He served as Speaker of the House, a U.S. Senator, and two-time Secretary of State. He laid the groundwork for the modern Republican Party and launched the Pan-American movement.

But Blaine never lived in Port Townsend, Washington. Charles Coon did.

That fact didn’t mean anything to us when we first moved into the house at 1028 Tyler Street. At the time we didn’t yet understand his relationship to it. We knew the name, but only faintly, and indirectly, through references that placed him in the margins: uncle, family member, resident. The 1910 census found him in the Pragge household simply as “Uncle” and “Retired Grocer” — not as head of household or property owner, but as someone’s elderly relation lodged within someone else’s domestic arrangement. When the time came to name our bed and breakfast, we named it for the people the record then seemed to place at the center of the story: Albert C. Adams, who built the house, and the Pragges, who had left the longest trail in the local archive.

We were not wrong, exactly. But we were not yet asking the right questions.

Our perception changed when we discovered a plumbing permit requesting a city connection to bring water to the house. A line in that municipal document identifies Charles E. Coon not as an elderly uncle lodged beneath someone else’s roof but as owner. He had not simply lived here. He had owned the house.

Once his name was no longer peripheral and we started looking, we found it everywhere. In newspaper columns, city records, campaign notices, and business directories. In mentions of the Port Townsend Mercantile Company. In accounts of public office, political clubs, and civic ambition, of the the city’s water system being built and Chetzemoka Park being created. The more we learned about this man who had been called Uncle Charlie by the entire town, the stranger his near-complete absence from that town’s public memory became.

Charles Edward Coon was not obscure in his own time. He was not just a minor resident briefly attached to a prominent house. He was not merely someone’s uncle — a retired grocer who happened to occupy a spare bedroom in old age. Charles Edward Coon had fought in the Civil War. He had gone into the Treasury Department in Washington, D.C., and risen through it by competence rather than inheritance. He had served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury and, for a time, Acting Secretary. Newspapers treated him as a man whose opinion mattered on finance, diplomacy, appointments, and the machinery of government. He crossed the Atlantic in connection with large financial transactions. His name appeared in relation to early communications technology endeavors, Republican politics, national patronage struggles, the aftermath of the Civil War, and even as a co-founder of one of the country’s first organized baseball clubs.

His career unfolded in the machinery of the postwar federal government: debt, bonds, appointments, resignations, political transition, the tension between reform and patronage. He was nominated by President Arthur to succeed John C. New as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury. During Secretary Folger’s illness and after his death, Coon acted in the department’s highest responsibilities. Newspapers speculated about whether he should become Secretary outright. Some argued that the only appointment universally acceptable would be to promote him. Others worried that the short remaining term of the administration made the office politically impossible. Then the administration changed. The Democrats came in. Secretary Manning wanted a Democrat in the role. Coon resigned.

The newspapers understood the event through the language of politics. They also understood it through the language of loss. One report noted that he had remained to help train the newcomers and keep the department steady before being asked to step aside. Another framed his resignation as a contradiction in civil-service reform.

The language of his whole career to that time was not flamboyant. It was administrative. Faithful. Efficient. Competent. Trusted. Those are not words that usually become monuments. Yet they are the words by which institutions continue.

Power had rooms. It had newspapers, hotel lobbies, reading rooms, private clubs, steamship departures, letters, appointments, rumors, and men who knew one another well enough that a name could circulate before a decision had been made. The archive shows not only a man losing office, but a system revealing itself. After leaving the Treasury, Coon made his permanent home in Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue Hotel. He appears repeatedly in documentation of that world: in the Union League, in Republican circles, in financial conversations, in interviews about England, Ireland, diplomacy, public finance, presidential appointments, and the concentration of wealth. The New York Times, Washington Post, New York Tribune, The Sun, and Boston Daily Globe all treated his opinions as newsworthy. In the summer of 1887, the Boston Globe noted on its front page that he was aboard the private steam yacht Meteor, cruising the New England coast in the company of General William Tecumseh Sherman. Charles Coon was quoted often enough to become vivid in the national imagination.

He had wit. He had judgment. He had a long frame and a dry manner.

The Sun reported on May 13, 1887, that each morning about nine o’clock he came down to the reading room of the Fifth Avenue Hotel with a bundle of daily newspapers; if his preferred chair at the far window was occupied, he waited until it was vacated, then seated himself with his long legs crossed so as to serve as a table for his papers, and read every line of the news of the day.

The following year, the January 21, 1888, issue of The Evening World found him in the same room and asked him about breach-of-promise suits. He drew himself up to his full height — six feet three, the paper noted — and answered with the timing of a man accustomed to being watched. He didn’t believe in such suits, he said; he had never taken advantage of one. As for himself, he said, he had left a young lady behind when he went off to war, having exchanged sweet promises, and had received in return only packages of needles and thread — for buttons fall off, you know, and all bachelors know how to sew.

The Jefferson County Historical Society’s history of the region, published in 1966, remembers him as “cultured, suave, infused of religion, tinted with literary ambition, bearing the impress of frontier life with social graces.”

And then he came to Port Townsend.

He was fifty-five years old. At an age when most men would have been consolidating the life they’d already made, Coon began another one.

He came west because of family. His niece Helen had married Charles A. Pragge, and the Pragges were already part of the Pacific Northwest world. His widowed sister, Camilla, came too. The family structure matters because Coon’s public name and private identity seem always to have met in the word uncle. And while “Uncle Charlie” may have started as a domestic nickname, it became a civic one. In New York, after Camilla’s husband died, he had taken in her children and helped raise them. The name traveled with him to Port Townsend and expanded, attaching itself to his politics, his presence, his manner, his public life. Near the end of one of his tenures as Port Townsend’s mayor, when someone asked what people should call him — Uncle Charlie? Colonel Coon? — he said he had always been partial to Charlie (Seattle Star, January 30, 1905).

There is modesty in that. There is also a puzzle.

How does a man who received every single vote cast in his final mayoral election become almost unmarked in the city he helped shape? How does a man of national office, local devotion, and civic consequence disappear so thoroughly that the file on him in a historical society can be thin, while his name remains scattered everywhere once one knows where to look?

This is not hidden history in the ordinary sense. Far from hidden, Charles Coon was almost extravagantly public. The newspapers knew him. Political men knew him. Treasury men knew him. Port Townsend knew him. It seemed that anywhere he went he moved almost effortlessly into leadership. He was elected Port Townsend’s mayor four times. In 1905, he was elected Lieutenant Governor of the state of Washington. The June 11, 1905, Spokesman-Review described as “the most popular man who had anything to do with the legislature” and showed how during his attendance as the head of Washington’s delegation to the Portland fair, “legislators looked upon [him] as a leader and fraternized with him to the exclusion of the [Portland] governor.” He was prominent enough that his comings, goings, opinions, appointments, business ties, and political possibilities were printed, repeated, clipped, and circulated.

His public life didn’t lack documentation; it lacked permanence — and that distinction matters.

Some people leave monuments to themselves. Others leave systems behind. Coon seems to have belonged to the second class.

He did not arrive in Port Townsend as a young speculator trying to make his name. If anything, he arrived already having too much of a name: soldier, Treasury man, Republican, administrator, bachelor, uncle, financier, officeholder, commentator, survivor of Washington, D.C., politics. He could have rested on the dignity of prior offices. Instead he entered the life of the town, helping to supply it, to govern it, and to sell the idea of it to itself and the nation.

Coon was a man carried by systems of circulation: newspapers, steamships, telegraphs, bonds, stores, elections, family networks, civic committees. His public identity moved through channels. It crossed the Atlantic. It crossed the continent. It moved from Washington, D.C., to New York to Chicago to Port Townsend — and from Port Townsend into Washington’s state politics.

Then, somehow, the channels closed.

Not all at once. History rarely disappears all at once. It thins and becomes assumed. It becomes local knowledge. It becomes “everybody knew him.” It becomes the one of dozens of city leaders in a caricature composite whose face needs no title. It becomes a bottle found by someone else and documented in their blog post, a city directory listing, a line in a newspaper index, a permit application for a city water connection, a business listing. It becomes a nickname on a gravestone.

This is one of the strange cruelties of local history: the more familiar someone is in life, the less carefully he may be preserved for strangers later. Everyone knew Uncle Charlie. And then, eventually, no one did. Or almost no one.

The question is not whether Port Townsend failed him. That is too simple, and probably unfair. Towns forget for many reasons. Buildings change hands. Families die or move away. Businesses close. Newspaper stories of the day disappear into microfilm. Civic memory favors some stories and loses others. A great man who did not insist on self-memorialization may leave less trace than a man of smaller consequence but greater appetite for commemoration.

Still, the loss is striking.

There is no major local monument to Charles Edward Coon. No common civic invocation. No ordinary tourist itinerary pauses over him. The house he owned is better known by other names and off the map of walking tours and their local color stories. The park, the city water system, the institutions, the civic assumptions he supported became part of the city’s functioning and therefore part of what later generations stopped seeing.

The streets, in their way, tell part of the story. In 1911, while Coon was still part of the city’s public life, Port Townsend renamed what had simply been First and Second Streets for Roosevelt and Taft — still writing the architecture of political memory into the grid, still honoring the national men. Blaine — a contemporary and colleague from Coon’s days in federal service — already stood at one edge of the block where Coon lived. Roosevelt would soon stand at the other. The city kept finding national names for its geography, but it never found a place for his.

That may be the deeper pattern: The labor that makes a place livable often disappears into the livability itself. City water flows into homes. Goods arrive. Parks open. Meetings are held. Streets are improved. A town becomes more itself. Then the names fall away.

The Port Townsend Mercantile Company places him in the city not as a distant political figure, but as part of its daily economy. The business was family-linked: Charles Coon as president, Helen L. Pragge as secretary, Charles A. Pragge as manager. City directories place the company centrally downtown at 311–313 Water Street. The surviving notices are wonderfully ordinary. New goods every day. Nearly every steamer, one item reported, brought groceries, flour, and feed for the Mercantile — goods arriving by water to be sold by weight and measure to a town still learning what it would become. A town does not live by civic speeches alone. It lives by the practical intelligence of getting fresh stock onto shelves in a place surrounded by water.

The Port Townsend Mercantile Company is long since gone. The later Water Street site has not become a shrine to Coon. It has done something more characteristic of Port Townsend and any city that retains so much of its historic architecture: it has kept changing use — surviving by remaining useful. That may also be one of the truest things one can say about Charles Coon.

The record suggests a man less interested in statuary than in conditions: water, commerce, parks, governance, civic morale, the machinery by which a town continues to believe in itself after the first expected future has failed to arrive. Port Townsend had expected greatness. The railroads had not come as promised. The boom had faltered. The city remained, but with a kind of wounded grandeur — its ambitions still visible in its buildings, streets, harbor, ornate houses, and in its confidence that beauty and consequence were not the same thing as size. Coon seems to have understood that kind of persistence. He had practiced it.

And yet Uncle Charlie is not entirely gone. He remains in fragments, which are sometimes how the past tells the truth. A formal biography might overstate coherence. A monument might flatten him. A plaque might make him smaller than he was. But the scattered record, for all its difficulty, preserves something stranger and more alive: a man visible in motion. Here he is in Washington, D.C., rising through the Treasury. Here he is in New York, a fixture reading newspapers in the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Here he is crossing the Atlantic to settle the debts of the Civil War. Here he is connected to financial schemes and early communications ventures. Here he is in Port Townsend, president of a mercantile company. Here he is elected mayor once, and again, and again. Here he is chosen by every single voter who cast a mayoral ballot. Here he is Lieutenant Governor, the official Washingtonians have to thank for Arbor Day. Here he is uncle. Here he is nowhere obvious. Here he is everywhere once one begins looking.

That is the form of him now. Not statue, house name, or polished civic legend. A constellation.

To write about Charles Edward Coon, then, is not only to reconstruct a life. It is to study the systems that made a life visible and the systems that allowed it to vanish. It is to ask what kinds of public labor survive as memory, and what kinds survive only as conditions. It is to ask how a city can retain a man’s works while losing the habit of saying his name.

When faced with a figure of this scale, it’s tempting to begin with the largest office and move outward from there. Acting Secretary of the Treasury. Lieutenant Governor. Mayor. Civil War veteran. Transatlantic financier. That would not be wrong. But it would not explain Uncle Charlie, the name that remained where the titles did not.

The people who buried him understood something better than later memory did: Offices are temporary. Elections end. Federal appointments vanish into ledgers. Political factions reorganize. The newspaper that prints a man’s name on Monday wraps fish by Friday. But the name by which a family calls him, the name by which a town recognizes his manner, the name carved into stone because it had become the truest public shorthand for affection — that is another kind of record. It does not tell us everything. It tells us what could not be replaced.

Charles Edward Coon died in early January of 1920, two months shy of his seventy-eighth birthday. He had lived long enough to have crossed several Americas: the Civil War republic, the federalizing postwar state, the Gilded Age of finance and patronage, the booster city of the Pacific Northwest, the early twentieth-century town still trying to understand what it had become. He is buried in a modest grave at Port Townsend’s Laurel Grove Cemetery.

That modesty now seems less like absence than instruction.

Not every life announces itself in stone. Not every form of importance becomes visible to posterity. Some men build the things that other people inhabit. Some become so familiar that no one thinks to explain them. Some carry public authority and private tenderness in the same body. Some spend a lifetime in systems of power and ask, finally, to be remembered as uncle.

The work now is not to rescue Charles Coon from obscurity by making him grander than he was. He was already grand enough. The work is to notice the scale of what disappeared, and to follow the fragments without forcing them into certainty too soon.

Because Port Townsend did not only lose a mayor. It lost Uncle Charlie.

Blaine and Roosevelt remain permanently memorialized in the city’s geography, bookending the block where Charles Edward Coon lived. But Coon survives mostly in fragments. The only stone monument to him does not remember him as mayor, lieutenant governor, Treasury official, soldier, financier, or president of anything. It remembers him simply, as Uncle Charlie.

Selected Sources: 1910 United States Federal Census; Port Townsend Daily Leader; The New York World; The Evening Star; Jefferson County Historical Society Research Center collections.

Zhenya Lavy writes The Turret Journal from within the Adams Pragge House, an 1889 Victorian in Port Townsend, Washington, where she and her husband serve as its stewards.

The Adams Pragge House is a three-suite bed and breakfast in Port Townsend, Washington. Learn more at adamspraggehouse.com.

→ https://adamspraggehouse.com

Related essays from The Turret Journal:

• Julia Yesler Benson Intermela and the Adams Pragge House

• Beyond the Bell Tower

• What Remains

We moved in on Wednesday, May 25, 2022. Joseph and I arrived with one car packed to the gills and a small box truck. Our twelve U-Haul Pods and grand piano would arrive later. The truck was unloaded while the house’s former owner prepared to hold a garage sale in the driveway. We found ourselves disoriented in a space we didn’t yet know how to navigate, uncertain even where to reach for light switches or how to move between rooms without knocking about in the dark. The house was bigger than we had perceived when we were only visiting, and that day its size became real.

We didn’t yet have our own furnishings in the house, but we had brought a brand new mattress that we set up in what would become the Victoria guest suite, and that’s where we slept for close to a month. It would be days before our things arrived and before we would learn — even with two days of help from a moving crew — that the process of physically moving into a three-story Victorian home is not for the faint of heart. Most of our belongings would eventually make their way to the third floor, which would become our private family quarters. Downstairs, the future guest spaces still stood mostly empty, and we had no idea yet what they would become.

It would be a year before we could open The Adams Pragge House Bed & Breakfast to guests. We’ve learned that running this inn, like inhabiting this house, is above all an act of stewardship — of the building, of its Uptown Port Townsend neighborhood, and of the long continuity between them.

Four years is not a long time by the measure of a house built in 1889. We are still figuring this house out — its 130-year-old puzzle of other people’s choices about wood and plaster, space and light, heat and water circulation. But four years is long enough to know that the work is larger than we imagined, the rewards are deeper and more specific than we hoped, and the surprises are still coming.

We are just the most recent of the long line of people before us who had to learn where the light switches were.

Zhenya Lavy writes The Turret Journal from within the Adams Pragge House, an 1889 Victorian in Port Townsend, Washington, where she and her husband serve as its stewards.

The Adams Pragge House is a three-suite bed and breakfast in Port Townsend, Washington.

→ https://adamspraggehouse.com

Related essays from The Turret Journal:

• Where Uptown Begins

• On Passing Through

• What Remains

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A house does not survive more than 135 years by accident. What remains is not permanence, but continuity carried imperfectly forward.

When we first toured the Albert C. Adams house at 1028 Tyler Street, it appeared to be in great shape from the outside. Inside told a different story.

The city had shut off the water. The buried propane tank at the rear of the property needed to be replaced. The house was still full — over-full, in fact: not staged for sale, not neutralized for future buyers, but deeply inhabited by the accumulated material of other lives and obligations still in motion. Statues stood in corners. Massive Tiffany floor lamps. Clocks. Barometers. Furniture from estates and embassies. Tools everywhere. Tables loaded with drawers of hardware, bins of parts. The parents of the previous owner, Marshall Raney, had been high-end antiques dealers, and after their deaths, much of what had passed through their lives passed, temporarily or otherwise, into this house as well.

Our earnest money paid to restore the water service and replace the propane tank before we arrived. A week or two after we moved in, Marshall had his brother install a new kitchen faucet that he’d already purchased.

He was holding a garage sale in the driveway and still had belongings on two floors of the house when we arrived with our moving van. For several weeks after closing, he remained in the process of moving out. Not lingering. Working. Undertaking the physical relocation — largely alone, in his sixties — of an enormous quantity of furniture, tools, antiques, architectural fragments, statuary, and equipment, which first had to have made their way across three floors, basement, and attic, into the garage to be organized and packed. Truckloads. Multiple protected storage units to coordinate. Decisions to make about objects accumulated across decades by himself, his parents, and even deceased friends.

The house was in active transition.

Today’s media and social spaces present a romanticized version of old-house life. Entire worlds exist online devoted to restoration and renovation: hidden fireplaces rediscovered behind drywall, original trim emerging beneath paint, dramatic before-and-after transformations presented in clean visual sequence. Even deterioration becomes aestheticized. And whether through excitement or exhaustion, the structure always appears to move steadily toward revelation.

We arrived carrying some version of that ideal with us. Having previously restored a 1917 Craftsman foursquare in Akron’s Goodyear Heights neighborhood, we understood that projects expand, budgets fail, and walls conceal surprises. But memory edits difficulty. And over time, what remains are the memories of meaningful discoveries, the accomplishment of stripped woodwork, the satisfaction of completion. The labor itself softens around the edges.

We learned, instead, that the house would tell us what needed doing — and that what it asked for would not always be what we expected.

In the earliest days, before our dozen moving pods had even arrived, some undone things seemed surprisingly simple. We found the missing globe for one of the foyer sconces sitting on the top shelf of a kitchen cabinet. It only needed cleaned and reattached. A half-painted piece of trim was solved by Joseph within minutes using a bucket of paint from the basement. There were small things everywhere that appeared, at least initially, to require almost no effort to complete.

I remember wondering why they had not already been done.

Not smugly, exactly. We knew enough to know there were things we did not yet understand. But there was still a kind of confidence in those early weeks — the confidence of people who had not yet encountered the scale of what remained invisible.

Because alongside those small repairs came the slow realization that, more than a house, we had inherited an accumulation of systems, adaptations, compromises, and unfinished decisions extending across generations. Pipes crossed the basement ceiling in dense and unlabeled paths, disappearing upward through three floors. Walls concealed altered uses and patched surfaces. The entire structure bore the narrative of changes in convenience and technology across more than 130 years.

One of the first major problems we tackled announced itself through water.

The house has a hydronic heating system, designed and installed by former owner and local plumber Ron Nowak in the 1960s. It was the house’s first centralized heating, and the fuel-oil furnace still powers the system sixty years later. But during a winter cold snap sometime before we purchased the house, a pipe had burst somewhere inside the walls while Marshall was away and had not been repaired. He had warned us about the leak: When the furnace was turned on and pressure returned to the system, water would rain down through the top of the doorway between the kitchen and what we now call the drawing room.

The visible leak, however, was not necessarily the source.

Marshall had theories about how we might find it. While we had hoped to work together to do so, we weren’t able to collaborate on this project before Marshall completed his move. And as our first summer turned toward fall, Joseph and I found ourselves puzzling over how to handle it. We had some tradespeople in to look at it — including Ron’s successor, Scott, who arrived in the original Nowak Plumbing truck — but none thought it was a job for them to take on, so we were on our own.

We started with the obvious: opening the wall above the doorway. Instead of finding the source of the problem, we found the beginning of another realization: every opening into an old house creates additional obligations. Walls are not abstract barriers. Once opened, they must later be repaired. In some cases that means plaster must be matched. The surfaces must be restored. Paint reconsidered. Rooms reassembled.

And immediately the scale of risk changes.

If we guessed wrong, we might end up opening walls across multiple floors, including in finished guest suites above the kitchen. Suddenly even locating a leak became a question of strategy, restraint, and acceptable damage.

What followed was less renovation than investigation. Listening. Studying. Trying to understand how water might have traveled internally through the structure to arrive at the top of that doorway. Joseph spent weeks tracing possibilities mentally before finally deciding to open a small section of ceiling in a remote kitchen corner on an exterior wall.

The opening was scarcely larger than a foot square.

Very fortunately, the leak was there.

A neighbor offered to solder the pipe. On October 11, 2022, we took our first delivery of fuel oil and started using the furnace.

But a slow leak at the site of the repair revealed itself almost immediately. We waited to repair the wall and ceiling, and for the next year we kept a bowl under the leak, emptying it every few days.

A year later, on October 10, 2023, Joseph texted me that Scott had agreed to fix the leak for good and would arrive in two days.

And today, nearly three years later, the leak is fixed — but the openings in the wall and ceiling remain unrepaired.

Not forgotten.

Simply overtaken by other priorities.

The house was beginning to alter our understanding of what unfinishedness meant.

At first, we still imagined stewardship primarily in terms of accomplishment. We began to understand it more often as negotiation.

The house has repeatedly changed our understanding of scale. Some projects we feared became unexpectedly manageable once the structure revealed another path of access or another layer of logic. Others expanded almost immediately beyond what we imagined possible.

For our first three years here, I worked in what had once been the butler’s pantry behind the dining room. We’d converted the space into my office because I no longer wanted to spend my workdays isolated away from the life of the family as I had during the pandemic in the daylight basement of our previous house. The old butler’s pantry has two seven-foot windows facing the morning light.

At first I arranged my desk to face those windows. As I learned how overwhelming the sun reflecting off the bay can be on this weather side of the house, I turned the desk to face an adjacent wall.

Ironically, the very same day Joseph had texted to say the final pipe repair was scheduled, at 5:25 p.m., I texted back: It’s raining in the office.

Not heavily. Not dramatically.

But enough.

The rain was blowing in sideways through the weather-side windows and reaching me where I sat several feet inside the room.

So before one water problem was fully fixed, with the end finally in sight, we had another — and instead of heat, windows became a priority.

We already knew the windows in the butler’s pantry were problematic. Marshall had pointed them out when we purchased the house. One didn’t even have sashes in it, just a storm window.

The day it rained inside, we discovered that the lower rail on the storm had deteriorated so badly it had fallen off. There wasn’t an easy option for repair. There was simply open space between the glass and the sill, between me and the elements. At first I stuffed towels into the gap. Later, I cut down a blue pool noodle and wedged it along the opening to block the draft.

For more than a year, this was genuinely our solution.

The pool noodle periodically fell out. The side exposed to the weather slowly bleached in the sun. I suspect the neighbors wondered what exactly we were doing. I joked about my pool noodle with colleagues.

But we knew it needed proper correction. Somewhat sheepishly, we contacted Rain Shadow Woodworks, whose reputation in town for historic window repair is unparalleled.

On an early fall day in 2023, Rain Shadow’s owner and master craftsman Seb Eggert walked through the house with us, examining not only the weather side but all 53 of our windows, assessing various conditions. He placed us on Rain Shadow’s schedule for restoration work, and at the time, I think we imagined this meant the problem would be resolved for winter.

As I write this in May 2026, two and a half years later since Seb’s first inspection, their crew is finally here installing 17 rebuilt sashes.

In the intervening years, my silly blue pool noodle gave way to other temporary strategies for keeping bugs out in the summer and heat in during the winter. We experimented with window insulation film, though the ornate profile of the wood trim made modern sealing systems difficult to apply cleanly. Joseph eventually transferred functioning sash components from another part of the house in order to improve one side of the set. He also built custom inserts using a heavy, transparent plastic sheet and insulating foam around a thin, 29” x 84” wooden frame.

The work became iterative.

Adaptive.

Seasonal.

Prolonged negotiation with imperfect conditions.

Our new focus on windows also has revealed new layers.

For example, the turret windows on the third floor are not glass at all. They are plastic. Beautifully done, convincing enough that we lived here a year before realizing it, but nevertheless plastic replacements for the original glass that were installed sometime during or after World War II.

At first this discovery felt disappointing, as though some authenticity had been lost. But the longer we live here, the less stable the idea of authenticity itself becomes.

Curved glass suitable for turret windows is still manufactured, but it commands a premium price easily 30 to 50 percent over flat glass. Under what circumstances had our turret windows needed replaced? Could previous stewards realistically have sourced or afforded such replacements given their own prioritization of projects? What matters more: continuity of material or continuity of form? If the choice decades ago was between improvised replacement or losing the windows altogether, does the substitution become failure — or survival?

The house resists clean answers.

Original or early wavy glass remains throughout much of the structure. Many windows have flat glass dating from after 1940. In other locations, windows have changed function entirely. What once was an exterior window now looks out to the utility room of the addition. And one of the original windows in the Victoria Suite had been converted to a door sometime many decades ago based on photo evidence, likely during one of the house’s periods as a boarding house. As part of our current window project, we asked Rain Shadow to restore that door to window form again. Although the sash pulleys had partially disintegrated from prolonged weather exposure, the original hardware still survived inside the opened cavity. As of last week, it’s possible to glimpse the evening sunset from that room again — and the new light completely changes the character of the suite.

Even the rooms themselves contain layered evidence of earlier lives.

While Rain Shadow had the framing open for work on the Victoria windows, we could see layers of historic exterior paint colors. We also observed that the original plaster and lath still survives beneath a thin layer of plywood installed long ago to stabilize or conceal failing plaster before wallpaper was added above it. Joseph was even able to retrieve fragments of earlier wallpaper from within the wall cavities. The top layer appears to date from the 1940s or 1950s: little pepper grinders and bottles in blue and green on white, suggesting that at one time this second-floor space contained a kitchenette if not a full kitchen — likely during the house’s boarding-house years. The bottom layer appears to be hand printed in the kind of pattern chosen for a bedroom or private sitting room. Another early scrap, pulled from what is now an en suite bathroom, reads entirely differently: a gold ground, subdued and close.

The walls reveal succession.

And increasingly, that feels true of the house as a whole.

Every layer reveals adaptation to changing forms of living: Heating systems added in the 1960s. Propane conversions. Capped stove pipe holes and clipped telephone and coaxial cables. Storm windows. Reconfigured rooms. Covered plaster. Reused hardware. Temporary repairs that lasted decades. Interventions that once appeared contemporary and permanent, then slowly became historical themselves.

We recognize, through this house, how even our own supposedly “timeless” decisions for our first house would be considered dated now. The wallpaper we had carefully selected had felt restrained, classic, and entirely appropriate to that 1917 structure. But looking at it now in photographs, it is unmistakably of its own 1990s era. Not wrong, necessarily. Simply visible historically in ways we couldn’t perceive at the time.

Perhaps every generation experiences at least part of its own taste as neutral. Then time passes, and what seemed invisible becomes the most visible thing in the room.

The fantasy that restoration returns a house to some singular authentic state becomes increasingly difficult to maintain. Every restoration is itself historically situated — shaped by the materials available, the technologies affordable, the aesthetics current, the labor possible, the economic pressures present, and the assumptions invisible to the people making decisions at that moment.

A completed renovation is not timeless.

It is another layer future stewards will eventually inherit.

That realization has changed how we think not only about our own work here, but about the work of those who came before us.

When we first arrived, certain absences frustrated me. Decorative sconces had been removed. The parlor mantle was gone. Various projects remained visibly incomplete. At first it was difficult not to experience these as losses due to someone else’s decisions.

But eventually we acquired our own unfinished projects.

Our own temporary fixes.

Our own evidence of compromise.

What is now the Olympia Suite bathroom was in disarray when our offer on the house was accepted. In order to satisfy the appraisal required for closing, we worked collaboratively and quickly to bring the room into functional operation. Joseph’s mother purchased the vanity. Our realtor and her handyman traveled from Seattle with plumbing fixtures and completed installations. A clawfoot tub sat inverted in the middle of the room with a red-painted exterior that Joseph later repainted white. Marshall had installed a heated tile floor but not connected it to power, and the controller itself had disappeared somewhere within his own drift of parts and projects throughout the house.

Nearly two years later, he found the controller and brought it to us.

Even now, after we attempted to install the controller, the heated floor isn’t functioning and will require electricians for further investigation.

The bathroom became operational long before it became complete.

And perhaps that distinction matters more than we initially understood.

We opened the Adams Pragge House to guests while still actively learning how to live within it ourselves. Historic houses do not cease evolving simply because they become operational. The house had to begin sustaining itself. Suites and public spaces could be elegant and welcoming while systems, walls, and future projects continued unfolding behind them.

Guests encounter atmosphere, comfort, hospitality, light, architecture, breakfast tables, flowers, conversation, the continuity of the house as lived experience. They do not encounter the electrical panel hidden on the third floor that eventually allowed us to bring electricity into two rooms that previously had none. They do not see the plaster blowout still waiting around outlets installed three years earlier after electricians navigated the complexities of the roofline to make those rooms inhabitable for our adult daughter and future workspaces. They don’t see the patched but unfinished drywall above the kitchen door.

Nor should they.

Even the smaller restorations here have begun to feel less like acts of recovery than acts of participation.

An antique bell on the front door, long nonfunctional, rings again because Joseph became fascinated enough to reverse-engineer the mechanism from surviving fragments and examples of similar bells. Its sound is unexpectedly grand — the kind of resonant ringing intended for formal arrivals at the front entrance of a very large house.

Nothing required him to make that repair. Another, functional and more modern doorbell had long since been installed.

Repairs like that matter because they continue the layered life of the house rather than reducing it toward utility alone.

That reduction happens gradually. Rarely through catastrophe. More often through convenience or comfort. A detail may be omitted because reproducing it is expensive. A repair simplified because labor is scarce. A replacement chosen because it is easier to source. Over time, enough small simplifications accumulate that the structure survives while much of its originality and particularity disappears.

I think about contemporary real-estate culture and how it may accelerate this further. Increasingly, houses are staged not as records of lived continuity, but as speculative projections for future buyers. Evidence of prior inhabitation is minimized. Rooms are neutralized. Surfaces simplified. Histories softened into marketability.

But old houses are not naturally neutral.

They are accumulations.

The house at 1028 Tyler Street did not greet us as a clean slate awaiting our imagination. It arrived crowded with evidence of prior stewardship, prior labor, prior attachment, prior incompletion. It still does.

Even now, the current window restoration has been revealing additional work beyond the original project scope: vulnerable exterior boards likely to fail in future storms, old vent patches requiring proper repair, missing metal flashing that perhaps always should have existed based on surviving evidence elsewhere on the house. Every intervention reveals adjacent needs.

The work expands contiguously.

One exterior wall painted this year. Another the next. Seventeen windows restored as resources allowed. A repair delayed until access aligns with another project.

Because houses like this exceed any single, final moment of completion.

This spring, we discovered that the current owners of our old Akron house have enclosed the front porch where we once spent so many mornings sitting together, eating strawberries and improvising absurd haiku. We had worked so carefully to honor what we understood to be the spirit and architecture of that house, but its life continued beyond us. Other owners arrived with other needs, other preferences, other interpretations of livability and beauty.

Perhaps that, too, is part of stewardship.

Not permanence.

Participation.

The longer we live here at the Adams Pragge House, the less convincing the idea of a “finished” house becomes.

There are still walls unopened. Systems only partially understood. Projects deferred until time and resources allow them to be done properly. Repairs that may never happen exactly as we currently imagine them. Layers still waiting beneath other layers.

The house remains in motion.

And perhaps that is what stewardship finally is: not completing a structure, not returning it to an impossible original condition, but participating for a time in its ongoing continuity — measured at human scale — before handing its unfinishedness forward again.

Zhenya Lavy writes The Turret Journal from within the Adams Pragge House, an 1889 Victorian in Port Townsend, Washington, where she and her husband serve as its stewards.

The Adams Pragge House is a three-suite bed and breakfast in Port Townsend, Washington. Learn more at adamspraggehouse.com.

Related essays from The Turret Journal:

• On Passing Through

• Beyond the Bell Tower

• The Revealing Season

Port Townsend tourism peaks in July and August — hot summer months when schools are out of session and families are most able to travel, when weather in Washington is expected to hold, and when most people assume the place will be at its best.

But while this may be the most concentrated period of summer vacation, I would suggest that for Port Townsend, the city is actually at its best earlier in the year — and that people traveling during the peak summer months not only must contend with the challenges of the tourism rush but also miss the more revealing season: spring.

By mid-April, as the famed Saturday Farmer’s Market reopens at Tyler and Lawrence, cherry trees are popping and early rhododendrons just beginning to bloom across Uptown. By this time of year — early May — the ground is mostly dry, and cherry blossom petals are falling as lilacs begin their turn and the rhododendrons light up our landscapes. Entire streets will appear to shift all at once as hedges, yards, and older plantings emerge into bloom in sequence — a dialogue playing out across blocks.

The air carries the scent of blossoms.

This is, I suspect, the time of year Sunset Magazine had in mind when it called Port Townsend the Paris of the Pacific Northwest.

In spring, Port Townsend is still in the process of arranging itself for visitors. It is active but not yet fully observed.

With each year I live here, I become more curious why visitors wait.

This year, the early months were even warmer than usual — and drier. Sheltered by the Olympic Rain Shadow, Port Townsend typically gets about half the rainfall of Seattle in any given year, and as of this writing we’ve had just 6.86 inches recorded in 2026 — 1.78 inches fewer than average. In fact, April had less than one inch of rain this year. Snow, too, was minimal, with a very light dusting February 18 and a bit of wet snow March 14 — neither of which lingered and nothing that was logged as accumulation. There had been overnight sleet December 27. For the first year since moving here, we captured no pictures of the house with snow.

It would be easy to treat this year’s weather as an anomaly, but it is not unfamiliar.

In late February of 1889, a local paper — The Weekly Argus — noted much the same. Geese had already begun to move. Frogs were active. Blossoms were appearing. The streets, it observed, were dry. The winter just past was described not for its severity, but for its absence: little snow, little sustained cold, and none of the conditions that would ordinarily mark the season.

“Signs of spring.

Large flocks of wild geese were seen yesterday, wending their way north. These unerring judges of the weather can tell us better than the signal service that our winter is at an end. The frogs, those pleasant harbingers of early spring, are also singing their piping notes. The pussy willows are in full bloom, and the red wild currant is spreading its showy flowers. Buds on fruit trees are nearly ready to open, and, if we do not have a cold snap in March, we will have spring open, and all its loveliness, before the first of May.

This has certainly been a remarkable winter. We have had two slight snow showers, neither sufficient to cover the ground. Despite their ordinance cows are serenely cropping the grass on the hillside. But spring is coming, and crowds of emigrants and tourists, who will soon introduce the civilized ways of eastern towns, and banish cows to secluded pastures green, where they can produce purer and healthier milk for our children, than from stable offal, straw from packing boxes, and the contents of swill tubs, which seems to be the favorite diet of the average town cow of Port Townsend.

The streets are becoming dry, and the average small boy is introducing the annual hoop, and the rolling of which is a sure sign of spring. Their older brothers are out on bicycles and velocipedes, and their sisters will soon appear with little baskets to gather dainty spring blossoms, or else stroll on the beach to pick up shells and sea moss. In eastern states such recreations do not take place till June, but in this favored region, especially Port Townsend, delightfully weather is so common that no one comments on it, except the newcomers from the land of blizzards, who think this is a near approach to the land of Beulah, the beautiful.”

~The Weekly Argus, Thursday, February 28, 1889

A year earlier, the tone had been more pointed. Responding to claims made elsewhere, the same paper suggested — half in argument, half in humor — that comparisons to milder regions were unnecessary. The weather here, it implied, spoke for itself.

“The other day a Walla Walla paper was bragging about violets being in bloom in the gardens there. Here in Port Townsend the weather is so tropical-like that siwash women and children go barefooted. Let Walla Walla or tropical California beat this if they can.”

~ The Weekly Argus, Thursday, February 2, 1888

The climate the Argus describes was not incidental to Port Townsend’s ambitions during this period. The city had positioned itself as the coming metropolis of the Pacific Northwest — seat of the federal Customs House and official port of entry and customs clearing center for Puget Sound since 1854, presumptive terminus of the transcontinental railroad, a place whose leaders fully expected it to become the region’s dominant commercial center. Local boosters called it “an inevitable New York” of the Pacific Northwest. As of the 1880 census, it was the seventh largest town in the Washington Territory at 917; by the late 1880s, population had surged to more than 4,500 residents — although some records claim there were more like 7,000 to 9,000 people in the area — and the town expected to outshine rivals soon with a population exceeding 20,000. People were building accordingly:

Between the years of Port Townsend’s settlement in 1851 and 1884, the pace of building reflected in WISAARD, Washington’s inventory of documented historic properties — not a record of everything that was built, but it is the most comprehensive assembly of what has been recorded about what was built — appears steady in lower number: one to seven properties constructed per year, with 1875 an outlier at 10.

By 1885, we see an inflection point, with 51 properties constructed that year. And from 1887 through 1890 we see a sharp escalation: 20, 43, 58, 104 properties constructed, respectively. 1889 nearly doubles the output of 1887; 1890 nearly doubles 1889. According to historian Peter Simpson, the three years between 1889 and 1891 alone generated 65 percent of the total volume of all the real estate transactions in Jefferson County in the forty years after the town’s founding.

These are the heady years that fueled construction of the massive and architecturally significant Jefferson County Courthouse and the Port Townsend Post Office, Court and Customs House, both of which are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. And Uptown on Tyler Street — one of the most architecturally intact Victorian residential streetscapes in the city — the result can still be observed. Houses follow one another in close succession, not identical, but clearly part of the same interval. Completed in 1889, the house built by Albert C. Adams — now the Adams Pragge House — belongs to this larger act of construction and place-making that unfolded across the town (see the map) within just a few years.

What the numbers reflect in aggregate, the press recorded in real time. On November 25, 1889 — the year the boom crested — the Seattle Post-Intelligencer ran a four-page spread on Port Townsend that devoted considerable space to the peninsula’s climate and had an equally considerable title: “Port Townsend. Facts About Our Thriving Neighbor. Position, Status and Prospects. From a Town to a City in Two Years. Its Enterprising Citizens. How and Why Port Townsend Has Made Such Rapid Progress – Review of the Railroad Situation – Etc., Etc.” The article made the argument that Port Townsend’s meteorological conditions made it a place where outdoor work could proceed with fewer interruptions than elsewhere on the coast. Contractors confirmed it from their own time-books.

(excerpt)

“Most of the rain this winter has fallen during the night, and but little during the day time. Mr. Williams, the contractor for grading Washington street, told me today that he commenced work in October last, and there has not been a day since that he has not had his teams at work. Mr. Devoe, who is constructing the elegant brick building for Mrs. Hastings and F. W. James, makes the same statement regarding the bricklayers’ and carpenters’ work. Mr. George Starret [sic], contractor and builder, Mr. Jonas Gies and other carpenters, Barthrop & Co., Frank Bowers and Dobbs Bros., painters, express the same opinion, which they verify from work time-books, that there are more out-door working days in Port Townsend, with less cold in winter and less extreme heat in summer, than at any place between California and Olympia, and where laboring men have less idle time. This peculiar meteorological condition of Port Townsend peninsula, makes this the healthiest place on the coast.”

~The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Monday, November 25, 1889

The building surge was not caused by the city’s climate, per se, but the climate was a significant part of the its marketing to attract residents and — even then — tourists, and the compression of Port Townsend’s building boom into such a narrow span of time certainly benefited from it.

But 1890 is the crest. After that, the numbers fall back: 33 in 1891, 10 in 1892, 1 in 1893, 3 in 1894. The population, too, fell.

The economic bust in Port Townsend in the early 1890s, primarily driven by the failure of the promised Union Pacific/Oregon Improvement Company railroad expansion to arrive, caused the speculative real estate bubble to burst. And the nation’s economic recession in 1893 — the Panic of 1893 — finalized the bust.

The bust did not erase what the boom had built. It stranded it.

By 1896, First National Bank had taken possession of what is now the Adams Pragge House from Albert C. Adams, who had been unable to find a buyer after its completion in 1889. He had been running it as a boarding house; the bank continued to do so while Adams set off to prospect for gold on Mary’s Island in Alaska. The houses he and so many others built stayed. Port Townsend’s accelerated building window left behind an architectural fabric dense enough to outlast the collapse that followed it.

Three rhododendrons grace the property of the Adams Pragge House. Two along the northwest wall start their light pink blooming in late April. The rhododendron at the front of the house — a large, dark pink beauty that defines the facade when in bloom — came to this property by way of the Jefferson County Fair sometime around 1968, won in a raffle by Ron Nowak, his son John recently told us. The Nowaks owned the house from 1962 to 1998 — the longest of any family — and that rhododendron has been blooming here already for nearly sixty years. By the time the Rhododendron Festival opens in mid-May, it is already well into its blooming season.

The Festival itself, now in its 91st year, is a massive civic undertaking for a small town. Five days of events: trike races down Water Street, a pet parade, a kiddies parade, bed races with a hair and beard contest for judging, a pancake breakfast, a spaghetti feed, a golf tournament, a Rhody Run, a Chautauqua, and a Grand Parade along Lawrence Street that draws marching bands — high school and college — in numbers you would expect in Seattle, not here. It may call to mind the version of small-town life Walt Disney distilled into a single Main Street, or what Mayberry tried to represent. But here it is not a set or a script. It is a functioning community, in a town with intact historic streets, doing what it has done since 1936, in the same place, at the same point in the year.

The same conditions the Argus observed in February of 1889 — the same conditions that buoyed the building boom.

Summer will come.

The tourists will arrive.

And Port Townsend will arrange itself accordingly, as it always has. But the season when it arranges itself — when the city blooms into flower and festival — is this one.

Zhenya Lavy writes The Turret Journal from within the Adams Pragge House, an 1889 Victorian in Port Townsend, Washington, where she and her husband serve as its stewards.

The Adams Pragge House is a three-suite bed and breakfast in Port Townsend, Washington. Learn more at adamspraggehouse.com.

→ https://adamspraggehouse.com

Related essays from The Turret Journal:

• Where Uptown Begins

• Julia Yesler Benson Intermela and the Adams Pragge House

• Beyond the Bell Tower

Every map draws a line. In Port Townsend, that line has stopped short of the upper end of Tyler Street — a continuous Victorian streetscape that lies beyond the routes and materials that define the city's architectural narrative.

Port Townsend was founded on April 24, 1851. This year, the city marks its one hundred seventy-fifth anniversary. The date also coincides with the opening of the 2026 Victorian Heritage Festival, a coincidence that does not occur every year and that sharpens the focus of both.

Each spring, the city turns to its past and directs attention to what remains. Walking tours, open houses, and events of all kinds gather into a season with the same gesture: pointing. Look here. Look at what has been preserved.

But the act of pointing is also an act of selection.

Every map draws a line. Every tour indicates where to turn and where to turn back. And in Port Townsend, even with its celebrated reputation as a haven for Victorian architecture, that line is often drawn more narrowly than the city itself.

Our family first visited Port Townsend in 2003, and we returned periodically over the years for weekend getaways from Seattle. We walked the city as it was presented — following maps, tracing routes, stopping where others stopped, admiring what we were led to admire. We assumed the frame was complete.

We had been to town a few times before we even ascended the bluff to explore Uptown — and when we did, our sense of historic Uptown worth looking at still wasn’t complete and essentially ended at Lawrence.

Then the line broke.

In January of 2022, we began visiting with a different purpose. We were considering a move, looking for a property that could operate as a bed and breakfast, and had two properties in mind — one of some renown, the other entirely off the usual routes. We returned more than five times to view them, neither ultimately suiting us. But what happened across these visits was that the fullness of Uptown started to become more legible. We had always driven in and out of the city through downtown, via Sims Way. But one day in late February, we left town by a different route, turning onto Tyler Street and continuing toward F.

Joseph drove. I watched the houses.

And as Joseph slowed to take the curve onto F, I saw a large Queen Anne Victorian appear as if out of nowhere — the chestnut color, the porch, the height, and above all the turret. This house sat outside what I had come to understand as the extent of the city’s historic fabric.

It was the house at 1028 Tyler.

I remember reacting aloud — surprise, then a question: How much else had we not seen?

A man I now know to be the former owner, Marshall Raney, was working in the yard. There was no for-sale sign. We drove on. I didn’t have more than a few seconds to take it all in.

In mid-March, during one of my nightly real estate searches, I happened to observe the moment it appeared on the market. We called our realtor, who learned there were other buyers already in line, traveling up from California within the week. I cast my search wider — Oregon coast, Upstate New York, east coast. A week later, the owner contacted our realtor. The California buyers fell through. Were we still interested?

We were there the next day. Within a week we had an accepted offer. On May 25, we moved in.

Only after we had moved in and begun re-establishing the house as a bed and breakfast did we look more carefully at how it, and the street it sits on, were positioned within the city’s official narratives. Or rather, how they were not.

The Chamber of Commerce map did not extend this far. The Wikipedia entry about Port Townsend’s historic district describes it as “roughly bounded on the northwest by Blaine Street” — one block shy of the corner of Tyler and F, cutting short just steps from two of the twenty-two houses classified as pivotal in the city’s Historic Residence Inventory. The materials produced through the Port Townsend Main Street program, which has stepped up to fill the tourism void left by the Chamber’s closure in 2024, focus understandably on the downtown commercial district. And when we had contacted the Port Townsend Heritage Association in 2023 to inquire about including the Albert C. Adams House at 1028 Tyler on their summer Uptown walking tours, we were told the distance from the tour’s starting point at the post office made it impractical: the guide could manage it perhaps once or twice a season if the group seemed up for a longer walk.

Each of these decisions has a practical basis.

Taken together, they produce a consistent result. The architectural story of Port Townsend, as commonly presented, gathers at the bluff and diminishes well before it reaches the interior of the neighborhood.

That is not how the city was built.

Tyler Street, at its full length, is less than half a mile.

Maps make arguments.

Every boundary is a judgment. Every omission defines what becomes visible. The current conceptual mapping of Uptown for visitors presents something real. It also leaves out a substantial portion of the same built environment.

Port Townsend’s new tourism brand is “Off the Path, On the Edge.” The tagline earns its keep — the city sits at the far end of a peninsula at the far end of a county, with water on three sides, the Strait of Juan de Fuca opening to the north, and the Olympics rising to the west. You don’t pass through Port Townsend on your way somewhere else. You come here because you meant to.

What we would add, from the far end of Tyler Street, is that the edge extends further than current conceptual mapping suggests.

Tyler is not a peripheral street. It runs from Port Townsend Bay’s waterfront downtown, to the base of the bluff, where the 1890 Bell Tower — the last remaining wooden fire bell tower in the United States — still marks the skyline above downtown and is a visible reminder of what was “central” from the perspective of safety. From the Bell Tower on top of the bluff, Tyler continues through the Uptown commercial district, through the residential interior of the neighborhood, and on toward Morgan Hill. It is connective tissue, a main artery that bends just before its final northwest extension, into F Street en route to Fort Worden and the locals’ way out of town.

From April through December each year Jefferson County’s Saturday farmers market occupies the segment of Tyler from Clay to Lawrence. At the intersection of Tyler and Lawrence, that continuity has a fixed address. Aldrich’s Market has stood here, in one form or another, since the 1880s — the oldest continuously operating grocery store in Washington State. This intersection is where downtown’s gravitational pull releases and the residential city begins in earnest. It is also, not coincidentally, where the walking tours and tourist maps often find their limit.

But the segment of Tyler Street that extends past the Lawrence threshold has retained an extraordinary degree of architectural continuity.

From the early houses of the 1860s and 1870s through the concentrated building of the late 1880s and into the first years of the twentieth century, Tyler holds one of the most intact sequences of Victorian-era residential structures in Port Townsend — and we believe, having walked it in every season and studied its record in some depth, possibly the most intact of any residential street in the city. What remains is not only individual buildings but the relationships between them: spacing, rhythm, orientation, scale.

A fabric, not a collection.

From Lawrence west through Blaine and past the houses that gather around Tyler and F, the south side of the street is composed almost entirely of structures built before 1900 — a continuity of historic homes whose architectural landscape has looked largely the same for more than a century. The north side isn’t far behind. In all, Tyler Street is lined with 31 historic structures. We know of no other residential street in the city that can make the same claim with equivalent confidence, though neighboring Taylor Street, which runs parallel to Tyler, is close at 28.

Earlier in its history, the section of Tyler northwest of Lawrence was known by another name thanks to Captain Henry Morgan, who built multiple houses along this stretch in the late 1880s and he lined it with maple trees. The name that resulted — Maple Avenue, Maple Street, both names sometimes applied simultaneously, the record not being especially consistent — described what you would have seen standing on the block and looking up toward Morgan Hill. Most of the maples are gone, replaced by other plantings over other decades. The name Maple persisted formally at least through 1902 and informally, from what we’ve found, until at least 1938. Over time, the name Tyler prevailed.

Captain Morgan’s own house stands at 857 Tyler, built in 1866 and expanded with evident care over the following decades — a side gable and wraparound porch added before 1911, changes made in sympathy with the original structure rather than against it. Morgan arrived in Port Townsend and proceeded to shape the physical city in ways still visible from almost any vantage point in Uptown. Beyond the houses on Tyler, he acquired what would become Morgan Hill, served in the Territorial Legislature, acted as federal Inspector of Hulls, bought and sold Protection Island twice, drilled for coal on Marrowstone Island, and started a teachers’ college — sited on Morgan Hill — that, like the maples he planted along this street, didn’t survive. His house did, and its front yard is a botanical richness that shares its abundance with Aldrich’s customers during the growing months.

At 820 and 828 Tyler, there is a pair of matching cottages built in 1888 as rental properties by the principals of Waterman & Katz, a leading Port Townsend business of the era. The firm was established by Sigmund Waterman and Solomon Katz, who had come from Germany; after Solomon’s death in 1879, his brothers William and Israel took over his stake. By 1888, when the cottages were completed and recorded in the county tax ledger under William Katz’s name, both William and Sigmund Waterman had died — leaving Israel Katz and Sarah Waterman as the surviving principals. Israel Katz became sole owner of the properties by 1891. He would later build his own house further up the street.

At 829 Tyler stands another of several houses Morgan built along what was once known as Captains Row. At 841 Tyler, the Hinds family house: John F. Hinds, grocer, whose shop stood at the southwest corner of Tyler and Lawrence, and whose wife A.M. Hinds was recorded as the owner of two improved lots on Maple Street in the county tax ledgers of 1887 and 1888.

The Francis Pettygrove duplex at 738–740 Tyler, built between 1888 and 1890, carries a name with unusual reach: Frank Pettygrove Jr.’s father, Francis W. Pettygrove Sr., was one of the founders of Portland, Oregon, who in 1845 won the coin toss that gave that city its name rather than the alternative — Boston. The son built and lived in the southern half of this duplex on Maple Street; the northern half was occupied by Dr. Charles M. Baldwin and his boarders.

At 809 Tyler, the William Harned house, likely built in 1875, possibly also by Morgan. William Harned worked as a Deputy Collector of Customs and later as a real estate broker. His second wife, Mollie Brooks, was an artist and student of Harriet Foster Beecher — a noted Puget Sound painter, and by marriage a niece of Harriet Beecher Stowe.

At 933 Tyler, the same Israel Katz who had inherited the twin cottages at 820 and 828 built a house in 1889 for his wife Adele. He became a prominent local businessman and served as mayor from 1915 to 1916. One morning in 1917, he left behind the personal effects anyone would normally take with them and simply disappeared. He was never found.

Across from our house, at 1023 Tyler, the Howard Smith house, built between 1885 and 1888, looks from the street essentially as it did in an 1889 photograph — one of the more direct comparisons available on the street.

At the the place where Uptown begins — the intersection of Tyler and F — Tyler’s upper block also begins in earnest.

The James Stockand House — which technically fronts F Street but has its largest surface fronting Tyler — dates to 1889. James W. Stockand was twenty-six years old when he built it, with the help of his brother-in-law Thomas Drummond, a Port Townsend contractor. Drummond’s own family houses stand further up the street, at 1221 and 1229 Tyler — built on land Peter Stockand sold in 1884 to his daughter Annie, who was Drummond’s wife. So Thomas Drummond was both James Stockand’s in-law and his builder; the street knits its families together in ways the property records only partially capture. The Stockand house and its carriage house were finished by 1890; it is the only seven-gabled house in Port Townsend. As with many historic homes in the city, rooms were rented to Fort Worden soldiers during the Second World War, and it came close to ruin before a restoration in the late 1970s earned it the local Mary Johnson Award. It has been beautifully maintained and further restored since. It is extraordinary.

In 1890, the larger of the two Drummond houses, at 1221 Tyler, was occupied by Richard A. Ballinger. At the time, Ballinger was practicing law in Port Townsend and serving as a superior court judge for Jefferson County. He would go on to become mayor of Seattle and to be appointed by President Taft as Secretary of the Interior — his tenure defined by the Ballinger-Pinchot conservation controversy that helped fracture the Republican Party in 1912. In 1890 he was a young man in a rented house on Maple Street.

And our house — whose history I’ve only just started sharing — at 1028 Tyler: the Albert C. Adams House, built in 1889 in the Queen Anne style with elements of the Italianate Villa and the Stick. Fifteen rooms. The house looks as it has looked for more than a hundred and thirty years.

Nothing on its face announces that anything has changed.

Many of these buildings are documented individually. They are never presented as a sequence.

Our recognition of that sequence and its merit did not arrive all at once. It emerged over time, and on foot.

During our first year in the house, Joseph and I would take long after-dinner walks together through the neighborhood. Unlike anywhere else we’ve lived, where the scenery eventually becomes routine, this neighborhood remains endlessly interesting: new things to notice, new ways of looking as the seasons change. An idea started to take shape, and once Joseph set his sights on the project formally, for more than a year he walked the city twice daily with our dog, taking different routes each time — sometimes gone a long time, covering ground the official tours didn’t reach — photographing houses that looked old, noting addresses, then researching them at home against maps, directories, tax records, and archival materials. What began as attention became method. Patterns emerged through repetition rather than selection.

The result is the Explore Victorian Port Townsend interactive map, a record assembled from the ground up rather than from established routes. The map now documents more than 350 surviving Victorian-era homes and buildings across Port Townsend. It is a map of relationships, not destinations — an attempt to render visible the architectural continuity that still defines the city but is only partially conveyed by existing representations. Where possible, it presents historic photographs for contemplation alongside walkers’ present-day views, allowing direct comparison of how the lived needs of residents have changed the visible structures.

A visitor exploring Uptown from the Bell Tower — up Tyler through the commercial district, past Aldrich’s, all the way past the bend at F to Taft, then taking Taft to Taylor and back along Taylor to Jefferson — will have seen, along these two principal streets and the cross streets visible from them, a comprehensive cross-section of Victorian Port Townsend in the most concentrated area of the city. From Tyler you can glimpse historic churches and even catch a view of other pivotal houses such as the Starrett and Peter Mutty houses. For those willing to take on a bit of incline, the loop of Blaine and Garfield adds another condensed layer. No tour shows everything. But this one gives you a sense of the extent of what’s here — beyond downtown and the bluff, beyond the courthouse and the post office and the three houses on the National Historic Register — all of which visitors can find on their own.

Here at 1028 Tyler Street — the Albert C. Adams House — there is no signage on the exterior of identifying it as an inn: The Adams Pragge House. The residential character of the block matters to us as neighbors. That decision avoids altering the immediate character of the block and aligns with the approach taken in our Explore Victorian Port Townsend map. The map makes no argument for any particular route through town.

We are not presenting the city’s history as an object apart from the city. We are participating in its existing continuity — as stewards of the Albert C. Adams House, of Tyler street, and of practical access to the architectural record Port Townsend holds in such uncommon concentration.

This year, as Port Townsend marks its one hundred seventy-fifth anniversary and the Victorian Heritage Festival opens on April 24, visitors will fill the city and will walk along the established routes.

Those routes stop short.

Beyond the Bell Tower and well past Lawrence, Tyler continues. So does the record.

The Explore Victorian Port Townsend interactive map, a public heritage project of the Adams Pragge House, is available at:
https://adamspraggehouse.com/explore-victorian-port-townsend/

Zhenya Lavy writes The Turret Journal from within the Adams Pragge House, an 1889 Victorian in Port Townsend, Washington, where she and her husband serve as its stewards.

The Adams Pragge House is a three-suite bed and breakfast in Port Townsend, Washington. Learn more at adamspraggehouse.com.

→ https://adamspraggehouse.com

Related Essays from The Turret Journal:

• Where Uptown Begins

• On Passing Through

• The Revealing Season

You do not enter a house like this all at once. You are admitted — and you are admitted in increments.

The porch receives you first — gracious, covered, neither fully outside nor yet inside. A space of inquiry: Is anybody home? May I enter? A space of protected waiting and, for those admitted, the first space of welcome.

The front door opens into the foyer, where arrival is briefly contained. You are still in a transitional space — not yet a space for living but for the small formalities of arrival: the hall tree receives jackets, hats, umbrellas, canes. The space requires pause, assessment.

There is no single path forward.

One door leads to the parlor, which can be fully self-contained. Another leads to the dining room, which can also be closed off. A staircase turns upward toward the more private floors.

And there is a second door from the porch that bypasses the foyer altogether, entering directly into the dining room. Like the door at the back of the house, it is tucked away — a passage intended for those who already belong, or who have been invited to behave as though they do.

In a house like this, entry was never meant to be singular or fixed.

This is the first indication: movement here is arranged.

The nineteenth century did not simply build houses; it built boundaries. Privacy — newly understood as something to be achieved rather than assumed — required enforcement. Walls thickened. Rooms separated. Circulation was organized into controllable sequences.

Before the mid-Victorian period, the line between domestic and commercial life had been permeable: workshops adjoined parlors, trade happened in rooms where families ate. The Industrial Revolution reorganized not only labor but space. The home withdrew, closed up, multiplied its walls, and established the interior as a world apart — then structured that world so movement within it would be graduated, managed, and legible.

The house became a system for determining who might go where, and how far.

Beyond the foyer, the first floor has no corridor, no spaces that exist solely for passing. Instead, the rooms lead into one another: parlor to dining room through double pocket doors, and from within the dining room, five thresholds branching outward to porch, foyer, and remaining living spaces.

To pass through is to choose, or to be chosen for, a sequence. You do not stand apart from the rooms and consider them from a distance. There is no neutral ground. You are already within them.

At the back of the first floor, past the drawing room, kitchen, and butler's pantry, the scale shifts. The change is subtle — doors narrow slightly, ceilings drop to ten feet, trim becomes more restrained. This part of the house came later. The original structure, built in 1889, did not extend quite this far. What exists here appears sometime between the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps of 1891 and 1911. It houses a utility room and a half bath — likely the first fully functional interior bathroom the house ever had.

The bathroom matters.

Port Townsend's first gravity water system — a wood-stave pipeline drawing from Snow Creek — was built between 1904 and 1906 and remained in operation until 1928. The record shows a 1910 permit application by a plumber acting on behalf of Charles Coon, who owned the house at that time, to connect it to the city water supply. Coon, whom I will introduce in depth in a future essay, had served as Port Townsend's mayor during construction of that very system. He had, in some sense, built the pipe that now ran to his door.

Why Coon added the rear addition precisely when he did is not documented, but the timing is suggestive: he was a man in his late sixties, living with a sister in her early seventies, in a house with forty-three stairs between the first floor and the third, newly connected to the water system he had spent years bringing into being.

It is not difficult to imagine that he was also thinking about what the first floor could hold: a bathroom, a room that could serve as a bedroom, a life that might, in time, require less verticality.

Both he and his sister, Camilla Merrick, died in this house — she in 1912, he in 1920. We do not know on which floor.

There is only one pathway to the upper floors: the stairway that asserts itself from the foyer. From anywhere on the first floor, you must wind back to the beginning — to the entry — before you can ascend to the house’s most private spaces.

The stair rises in a measured incline. Its character is distinctly Pacific Northwestern, with its solid newel and balustrade suggesting something closer to timber than ornament. It is broad enough to accommodate presence without haste, but it does not offer the glamorous, open curvature of grand eastern houses. It turns once, and then again before arriving at the second floor, breaking the ascent into segments. There is no landing at these turns. Rather, each is accomplished with smaller, wedge-shaped steps that interrupt the body's expectation of continuity and replace it with a greater need for deliberation.

The body begins, here, to plan itself.

I have done this kind of work before — the rehearsal of the body in space, the repetition that teaches the form beyond the mind’s articulation of it. The theater I came from was built on this: movement structured, repeated, refined until the body understood before it could explain.

The house does something similar. Not performance exactly, but not mere transit, either.

The staircase exacts a quality of attention that open floor plans have forgotten how to require.

Forty-three steps between the ground floor and the third. You traverse them less frequently than you would in another house. You begin to count them not as numbers, but as decisions.

You learn what can be carried and what cannot. What is worth the ascent, and what can wait. A round trip from the third floor is an eighty-six-step commitment. Is it really necessary?

You are always calculating, scanning your surroundings for anything you might need on another floor in the next day or so, if not now. Already on the second floor — Have I forgotten something on the first? Is there anything on this floor I should grab or drop off before continuing? Am I carrying everything in a way I can manage when the handrail switches sides between flights?

The second floor receives you differently.

Here, at last, there is a hallway — the corridor that gathers the rooms and holds each at a remove from the others. Doors close. Movement becomes contained. What was fluid below is now ordered and restricted. What was shared becomes private.

The hallway is the architectural invention that made privacy enforceable. It belongs to no room and therefore governs all of them. Movement becomes accountable.

Another stair continues upward.

From the second floor to the third, the stair narrows. The ascent requires greater care—not dramatically, but enough that it cannot be ignored. The basket I can carry widthwise from first to second floors must be shifted to lengthwise from second to third, and I now rely on my hip as much as my arms to hold it aloft.

At the top, the organization of the house shifts again. Six rooms radiate outward from a central landing, their doors opening onto a hub of shared space around the well of the stairway. Each room meets the landing directly.

The linear, directional, mediating order that the second floor hallway enforced has given way on the third to a centrifugal logic. Here, the individual rooms express themselves outward, claiming light, pressing through the primary roofline as gables and cross gables. The resulting roofscape is highly textured, volumetrically complex, a map of adjacency. The centrifugal logic of the third floor carries into the turret room itself: curved interior walls that resist furniture standardization, force intentional use, and gather and rotate light.

The turret room completes the vertically continuous projecting bay and concludes the corner hierarchy that organizes space across all levels — its conical roof interrupting the gabled system, introducing a cylindrical counterweight to the angular roofline — key to the asymmetry that defines Queen Anne architecture.

The conical roof was built as exterior statement, to be admired from the street, compelling the pedestrian gaze upward like the prayerful gesture of a church spire.

But from inside, in the third floor turret room, the Victorian gaze inverts: the house that was built to display becomes the place from which one watches.

I come here to think, to work, to rest. I come here to photograph the garden, the street, the light as it descends. In this space, I disappear into attention.

Above, the attic withdraws differently still. Its stair is not fixed but pulled down when needed, concealed when not in use. Access here is temporary, contingent. The space itself is extraordinary: massive, old-growth, tightly grained fir beams, the full interior volume of the roof, the access point into the interior of the turret’s cap. We have considered making it a library. The architecture makes such a condition imaginable: a space above the visible house, inhabitable yet removed.

Not all bodies are equally admitted by a house like this.

The stair that organizes movement also limits it. The thresholds that refine experience also exclude. Verticality is both choice and privilege. There are forty-three steps between the ground floor and the third, turns that cannot be taken quickly, widths that cannot accommodate assistance, transitions that assume balance, continuity, and strength.

My mother, who has lived for thirty-three years with the aftermath of stroke and now requires a wheelchair, could never move through this house as I do. There is no sequence by which she could arrive at the rooms above. The choreography — so precise, so legible to the bodies it was built for — fails hers entirely. The house requires physical mobility, and it does not adjust.

This is not an abstract thought for me. It is concrete, and I think about it both in relation to guests and in relation to time. What the house requires of the body now, it will continue to require.

There is only one first-floor space that could function as a bedroom: the former butler’s pantry, now an office but easily repurposed. It adjoins the dining room on one side and the early-twentieth-century half bath on the other. The path from the front door to that room requires no stairs, and the entry steps could be adapted.

Charles Coon may have understood something of this. The addition he likely commissioned, the bathroom he certainly connected — these suggest a man who knew, as we all eventually know, that the vertical logic of a house is a kind of agreement, and that agreements can be renegotiated when the body requires it. They also suggest a life adjusting itself downward, toward what could be reached without ascent.

Now in our later fifties, Joseph and I have begun to consider what renegotiation might look like for us. Our current inclination is to install a small elevator along the back of the house, where it would not be visible from the street — altering the internal logic without changing the exterior presence.

We are not there yet.

The house also has edge conditions.

On the third floor, double doors between the turret room and the adjacent bedroom allow connection to be granted or withheld — the bedroom side locks.

On the first floor, the double pocket doors between the parlor and dining room glide open and closed. They do not lock. Their function is one of modulation and drama, not security.

These are the places where the house makes legible that what it has been regulating, all along, is not merely movement but relationship.

To move through a house like this is to encounter a series of permissions: some granted easily, others requiring adjustment, still others withheld unless you know where to look.

The house never had a servant’s stair. But because it now functions both as our home and as a bed and breakfast, we have found our own version of managed movement.

We move with awareness of where guests are and where they are not, shaping and timing our paths so that they may experience the house as if it were theirs — illusion without interruption.

The previous owners, Marshall and Selena Raney, who ran the house as a bed and breakfast for four years in the early 2000s, resolved this by removing themselves entirely during peak summer months, retreating to an Airstream elsewhere on the property.

We believe the home people are invited to experience should be real and lived-in. A house without its inhabitants is not a home, whatever it looks like. We do not offer the performance of habitation; we offer the thing itself.

This requires its own choreography — not concealment, but discretion.

The same rooms have held different patterns of passage over time.

Earlier in its history, when the house operated as a boarding house, the second-floor hallway would have mattered differently, privacy enforced by the corridor between strangers sharing a structure but not a household. There were no private kitchens, no private bathrooms. The kitchen and sanitary arrangements required negotiation: a choreography of the communal.

As a single-family home, when Julia Yesler Intermela held the deed and she and Charles and their children believed they had many more happy years together here to look forward to than they actually did, the rooms organized intimacy: a family, a household, a life lived in the full vertical range of the structure.

After the Intermelas, from 1907 to 1935, Charles Coon, his sister Camilla, and his niece’s family — the Pragges — moved through the house in the overlapping choreography of multi-generational dwelling, with its extensions of care, dependence, and duration.

Each use produces a different map of passage through the same structure.

The architecture does not change. The meaning of movement does.

What appears, at first, as the idiosyncrasy of an old house reveals itself, over time, as something more exact: a structure that directs movement.

You slow where the stair turns.

You plan what to carry and what to leave for later.

You understand that not every path is equivalent: that the back of the house operates under a different register than the front, that the second floor asks something different of the body than the first, that the third floor is the reward of forty-three stairs, the place where the house releases its grip and everything becomes view.

The first floor meanders. The second advances. The third pivots.

The body adjusts to the logic of the space. And in that adjustment something else occurs — not discipline exactly, but a quality of attention that reshapes how you inhabit time. You arrive differently than you would have otherwise. By having moved through the house, you understand something about it that cannot be understood only by looking at it.

The Victorian architects who designed these systems of managed circulation may not have intended attention as their gift. They intended order: the enforcement of privacy, the maintenance of social distinction, the legibility of rank. And yet what survives: what the house still does, a hundred and thirty-five years on, to any body that moves through it with any degree of wakefulness, is invite us to notice. To slow and feel the turn of the stair. To rest at the landing. To understand that a door is a question before it is an opening, and that the answer is not always the same.

Forty-three steps. What you carry. What can wait. How frequently you ascend.

You learn the house by moving through it.

The stair will still turn after I have last set foot on it. The turret will still gather and hold its curved, late-day light. Someone else will count the steps and learn what to carry. They will pivot their day on the third floor — mornings standing in the powder room at the back of the house to watch an April sunrise blossom rose over Admiralty Inlet as a ferry makes its steady journey from Port Townsend toward Whidbey Island, and evenings looking out from the turret across Tyler Street, beyond the seven-gabled Stockand House and its Deodar Cedar, toward the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the westward expanse of the Olympic Peninsula — and feel they have arrived somewhere that required something of them and rewarded their presence.

The Adams Pragge House, built in 1889, stands at 1028 Tyler Street in Port Townsend, Washington. It operates today as a historic bed and breakfast with three guest suites on the second floor. The Lavy family lives on the third floor. It has forty-three interior stairs. This is how we describe the house’s accessibility.

Zhenya Lavy writes The Turret Journal from within the Adams Pragge House, an 1889 Victorian in Port Townsend, Washington, where she and her husband serve as its stewards.

The Adams Pragge House is a three-suite bed and breakfast in Port Townsend, Washington. Learn more at adamspraggehouse.com.

→ https://adamspraggehouse.com

Related Essays from The Turret Journal:

• Where Uptown Begins

• Light the Turret Gathers

• Beyond the Bell Tower

The complete history of the Adams Pragge House at what is now 1028 Tyler Street had been forgotten – within its walls, in the papers passed down with it, and in the records of the city that once knew it.

It seemed everyone we met had a story:

“I rode a claw foot tub in through a second-floor window” (our former coffee roaster)

“I loved playing around the little koi pond that used to be there” (a woman who attended an Adams Pragge House event)

“My buddies and I would run through this yard to hide from the cops” (the man we bought a marina staircase from)

Aside from general information about the previous two owners and the photos and papers they left, dating back to the early 1960s, we also had

• awareness that military couples were housed there during World War II and that the San Juan Baptist Church was founded in the parlor;

• murmurings that when many of the grand Victorians fell into disrepair in the post-war recession years, the city considered burning the house as practice for fire fighters;

• a 1942 Christmas card found deep in a pocket door;

• an empty pack of Marlboro cigarettes and bag of Cheetos, 1970s-era, found on the attic floor up in the Witch’s Hat; and

• published recountings of ghost stories our own experience cannot confirm.

But these were the familiar fragments of more recent history. And like the ghost stories, the record did not hold, and it did not resolve into a coherent history.

Joseph and I moved into the house in late May 2022. For nearly two full years after that, Joseph worked almost obsessively to research and reconstruct the full ownership history of the property and flesh out the lives of its inhabitants.

City property records provided a partial sequence of names. Newspaper notices in the Leader archives and the earlier Argus archives filled in occasional details. The Jefferson County Historical Society, whose collections represent a remarkable act of sustained local stewardship, held biography files, and helpful staff showed us big, leather-bound account logs from the local pharmacy detailing what one had bought over time and other carefully preserved objects. Among them another inhabitant’s beaded 1920s-era tea gown.

But the information on the house itself in the Historical Society records was thin, and biographies didn’t fully attach to it. Some of what we found was inaccurate or misleading but, nevertheless, retained as part of the history of the house.

Even the name it had colloquially gone by for some sixty years, under which it was established in the digital age — the Captain John Quincy Adams House — was factually incorrect and took us a year to unravel.

Joseph pored through every photograph in the Historical Society and University of Washington online archives connected to Port Townsend and its inhabitants — whether they seemed relevant or not — hoping to catch even just a glimpse of the turret in the background of a wider shot or a face that could help place one more piece in the puzzle. He scoured — and we sometimes purchased — city directories found in antiques stores or auctions near and far.

Individual names slowly settled into their place within the house and the life of the town, but gaping holes remained in its earliest history.

I found this difficult to reconcile with the house’s prominence and the role it had been intended to play within Port Townsend’s grand project of civic ambition — entire neighborhoods of gracious houses laid out and marketed to attract the wealthy class that would make this corner of the Olympic Peninsula what its promoters believed it was destined to become: Key City, the City of Dreams.

The largest of those holes, as it turned out, was also the beginning:

The original owners.
The family Albert Adams dreamed would arrive to make him a wealthy man when he built the house on spec in 1889.

They were the last piece to fall into place. And when they did for us, finally, in the winter of 2024, the shape of the history resolved differently. And with it, our perception of our own role as its stewards changed.

The family came to our awareness — as one always does — through his name: Charles Intermela.

But it was the revelation of her that changed everything.

She carried several names across her life, as women of her time and circumstance often did.

In the territorial census of 1871, two letters would be placed by her name.

I will come back to those letters.

The name I will start with — distinct from the names of the men who made, raised, or sheltered her — is Julia.

Julia was born in Seattle on June 12, 1855 — before Seattle had become a city, at the precise moment it was being invented.

Her father was Henry Leiter Yesler, the entrepreneur from Ohio who arrived in the region in 1852 and established the first steam-powered sawmill on Elliott Bay. Almost immediately, Yesler’s mill became the economic spine of the settlement, its long chute of greased logs running down Mill Street to the lumbermill at the waterfront and giving the street a colloquial name so precise for its moment and flexible to its future — Skid Road, Skid Row — that it remains an established part of the American lexicon and even has been the subject of Broadway musical songs. When Washington Territory separated from Oregon in 1853, he was appointed county auditor. He would later serve three terms as King County commissioner and twice as Seattle mayor. He was Seattle’s wealthiest resident in his lifetime. He built the city’s first water system. He helped build Seattle itself and then dug in again to help rebuild it after the Great Seattle Fire of 1889. Skid Row is now Yesler’s Way. His name attached to the city’s founding mythology so completely that it functions now more as landscape than biography. Ambitious and ruthless, complicated and unconventional, a capitalist who was nonetheless responsible for the city’s first library before it even had a university, free thinking and expansive yet maddeningly constrained to his time — Yesler was the Father of Seattle.

Julia’s mother was Susan Curley. Susan was the daughter of Suquardl, the Duwamish hereditary leader known to settlers as Chief Curley. Suquardl worked closely with Yesler, serving as foreman at the mill — a position that required him to move constantly between the world of the new settlement and the surrounding Duwamish communities, translating not just language but intention, absorbing friction before it could become violence. Susan worked at the mill with him.

This was not incidental. The Duwamish leadership understood, from early in the settlement’s life, that proximity to the men building this place was its own form of negotiation — that kinship with power was how a people without military advantage shaped what was coming. Suquardl’s role at the mill was part of that understanding. So was Susan’s presence within Yesler’s household. She was fifteen years old when Julia was conceived.

During the tensions that culminated in the Battle of Seattle in January 1856 — when Julia was seven months old, when the USS Decatur sat in the harbor with its guns trained on the town — Suquardl carried warnings between communities, working to contain what could not fully be contained.

Yesler himself recounted, for The Puget Sound Gazetteer (”The Daughter of Old Chief Seattle,” September 1888), how Suquardl was fishing in his canoe when he encountered an old woman on her way to Old Man House, on Chief Seattle’s reservation. She told him that the Duwamish Indians under Chief Claycum had gone with Chief Leschi and the Puyallup Indians to fight the people of Seattle, to wipe them out of existence. Suquardl brought this information to Yesler. Yesler took the report to Captain Guert Gansevoort aboard the Decatur.

A contemporary of Yesler’s from Indiana, Nicholas Sheffer, confirmed the story of Suquardl’s warning for The Lynden Tribune in 1909, and then, unprompted, gave us something more:

The Indians were pressing us pretty close and it was considered the part of wisdom to put the women and children aboard the war ship. I was in Seattle that day [January 26, 1856]. Mr. Yesler’s woman did not take kindly to the idea of going on the ship to live, but was at last prevailed upon to do it on account of the baby girl of which the father was very fond. Yesler was a good man, never making himself conspicuous, never crowding himself forward, but his opinion or advice when given was generally about right. He was not married to the Indian woman but when his wife came he did not do like many others, drive the girl back to her tribe. He provided for the Indian woman and looked out for her welfare and for that of his daughter by her. He gave the daughter as good an education as circumstances would permit. I had the pleasure of meeting the daughter about two years ago. She is married to a very nice gentleman who is one of the foremost citizens in the city and county where they live. She is a perfect lady and is respected by all who know her.

Susan was among those taken aboard.

The record leaves the moment there: Susan’s reluctance; Henry’s decision. On surface, a decision to protect. But the conditions surrounding it complicate that decision and illuminate the reluctance. The warnings Suquardl carried did not come from a distance. They moved through the same network of relations to which Susan belonged. To board the ship was not only to seek protection. It was to cross a line that had only just been drawn, and not by her. That she crossed it anyway — prevailed upon by Henry, on account of the child — tells you something about what the line cost.

Had the revelations about Julia’s lineage ended here, that alone would have been significant. But there was more:

Suquardl’s brother was Si’athl.

Chief Seattle.

Julia was the living fact of what those worlds had already made of each other — deliberately, strategically, at great cost. Her father, her grandfather, her great-uncle each shaped what Seattle would become. And the child — and the city — born at that intersection were what the shaping produced.

In the 1871 territorial census, the enumerator recorded her name and placed beside it two letters:

HB.

Half-breed.

Which is to say: the census knew what to do with Henry Yesler. It knew what to do with Suquardl. It knew what to do with Si’athl. And what it did with the child born at the union of those lineages was reduce her to a fraction.

When Yesler journeyed west to the shores of Elliott Bay in 1852, he had left a wife, Sarah, and their five-year-old son in Ohio. Sheffer recalled, “Most of the white men on Puget Sound then, whose wives were not with them, had Indian women for housekeepers, clam diggers, etc.” Some white settlers viewed the associations of white men and Native women with disapproval tinged with racism.

Three years after Julia’s birth, and after six years of separation, Sarah finally moved to the Washington Territory, arriving in July. Too sickly to travel, the boy stayed behind with relatives. He would die a year later, never having reunited with his parents.

Sheffer recalled: “Mrs. Yesler, when she came and found Mr. Yesler the father of the little daughter, took the little one to her home and treated her as her own child.” Nevertheless, in that same year, with Sarah’s arrival and Henry’s ascent to office as County Commissioner, the household arrangement changed. Henry sent Susan Curley to live with Jeremiah S. Benson, a cook at his mill originally from Michigan. He sent young Julia with her. Susan later married Benson and had another daughter with him. Julia spent most of her childhood within the Benson household. In the territorial records, she became Julia Benson.

Yesler’s Cook House, which had just been erected in winter 1852–53 to serve his mill employees, had by the mid-1850s become the settlement’s most important multi-purpose building — at times military headquarters, storehouse, hotel, church, entertainment hall, district court, town hall, jail, and county auditor’s office. By placing Julia with the cook, Henry Yesler kept her close to his world.

Susan died when Julia was seventeen.

The date of her death was not recorded, and the timeline is not precise. The 1870 census places Julia with Benson, but the 1871 census shows her again in Yesler’s home. Whatever the precise sequence, she did not remain with Benson after her mother’s death. Yesler arranged for Julia to live with Charles B. Pierce — a trusted business associate — and Pierce’s wife Jennie, who soon relocated to Oakland, California. Julia was seventeen when she arrived in the Pierce household.

She was thirty-five when she left it.

Eighteen years.

The full span of what her era would have considered a young woman’s most marriageable years — the years normally organized around courtship, around the expectation of establishing a household of one’s own — Julia spent within someone else’s family. Neither daughter nor wife, neither fully independent nor entirely dependent. What the arrangement meant to her, whether she experienced it as refuge or constraint or the particular weight of a long situation one cannot name, the record does not say. What it meant to Yesler is harder still to read. He was by then a public figure of considerable standing — county commissioner, city aspirant, a man whose position required the careful management of appearances. A daughter marked HB in the census, however educated and well-placed and however fond he may have been of her, would have faced a narrowed field of acceptable marriage in the social world he inhabited, particularly in the California to which the Pierces moved, where the racial hierarchies of the post-Gold Rush West were enforced with the particular rigidity of a society still working out what it had become. Perhaps the Pierce household was protective. Perhaps it was expedient. Perhaps — and this is the reading that sits most uneasily with me — it was both simultaneously, and Yesler found in the arrangement a way to provide for Julia without having to solve, openly, the problem of who she was.

And yet he did provide for her. He educated her. He kept her within what would have been considered a respectable household for nearly two decades. And at some point — perhaps through directed provision or through the quiet workings of a wealthy man’s intentions toward a beloved daughter, but not through open inheritance — he gave her something the law could recognize even when it preferred not to recognize her.

The means to property.

What is certain is that she was not diminished by whatever men arranged around her. The photograph of Julia as a teenager — and it is a remarkable photograph — shows her seated at a studio table, composed and self-possessed, needlework in her lap, a book open beside her. She is dressed in the fashion of a young woman of standing. She looks directly into the camera without apology. Whatever may have been taken from her, she does not look like a woman who understood herself as a fraction.

Around 1878, Julia returned to the Puget Sound region with the Pierces, who had established a homestead in Quilcene, on the eastern shore of the Olympic Peninsula. Another recent arrival in that small community was Charles Leander Intermela. They met and were married in 1890. Julia was thirty-five.

Within a decade of her return to the Puget Sound, she had a husband, two children, and — though this would only become fully legible to us more than a century later — a house.

Charles ran for Jefferson County Sheriff as a Republican and won. The office brought them to Port Townsend — the Olympic Peninsula’s principal port, a city that had briefly touched greatness and was now learning to live within more ordinary proportions.

The house Bert Adams had built on spec for $5,000 during the boom of 1889 had stood without a buyer for thirteen years. He had lost it to the First National Bank in 1893, when the railroad failed to arrive and the boom collapsed.

It was a house constructed for a future that never came.

Until they did.

They purchased it for $1,000 on December 31, 1902, and moved into the house at 426 Maple Avenue — what is now 1028 Tyler Street.

The Intermelas came to this house with two children — Elsia “Elsie,” then ten, and Charles Jr., nine — whose youthful exuberance and imagination would sweep in from its gracious porch, up the turn of the staircase, through its hallways and many rooms, to its turret, like something out of a fairy tale.

Charles was the Sheriff, the public figure, the Republican with civic ambitions — who would rise to City Treasurer while the family lived in the house — whose name appeared frequently in the newspaper in connection with county business. But we learn through its eventual sale that the house was actually Julia’s. In an era when married women’s property rights remained severely constrained — when a wife’s possessions typically passed under her husband’s legal control at marriage — the house on Maple Avenue stood in her name. A contemporary newspaper account would later report that it was sold as part of her estate, not his, and the handwritten transfer of title to the next inhabitants shows unequivocally that the house belonged to the Estate of Julia Yesler Intermela. Charles Intermela was merely the administrator of her estate. How this arrangement came to be is not entirely certain, and the existing record of the house’s sale to the Intermelas shows only that Charles closed on the sale – ownership in his name implied by the absence of a declarative statement to include hers. But the most plausible answer is also the most resonant: that the fortune Henry Yesler accumulated over a lifetime of mill-owning and land speculation had, in some portion, made its way to his daughter. The man who had moved Julia between households, who had kept her at a careful distance from his public life across eighteen years, had also — perhaps as restitution, perhaps as love, perhaps as both at once — ensured that she could own something outright. That she could have, in the eyes of the law that had once written HB beside her name, a house.

During her years in this house Julia participated actively in the civic life of Port Townsend. She was a member of the Women’s Relief Corps, in which she served as Junior Vice President beginning in January 1906. She was a member of the Women of Woodcraft and its local chapter the Heather Circle, in which she served as Attendant. The newspaper notices that record these affiliations are brief, as such notices always were — names in a list, offices noted, the ordinary texture of a woman’s civic life rendered in a few column inches and then filed away. But taken together they describe someone woven into the social fabric of the town, present and participating, known. In these, she is Mrs. C.L. Intermela.

I find myself returning, though, to the smaller and more private picture. To family recollections that describe her entertaining with a delicate Haviland china dinner service, pieces of which have remained within the family for generations. To Julia in the parlor — the polygonal room on the ground floor, seven double-hung seven-foot windows set into its walls: four forming the angled bank of the turret facing west, one facing northwest, two southwest on the front of the house. In the afternoon, this room held more light than most Victorian interiors were designed to contain. Through those west-facing windows, across the way, the Stockand house — another monument of Port Townsend’s most ambitious year. The ordinary view of a street and a town she’d had the means and the standing to choose.

Newspaper records tell us that in October 1903, a group of boys and girls surprised Elsie at her home, where they played games and enjoyed supper. I find myself imagining Julia at the door, welcoming them in — whether she had helped plan it and was watching Elsie’s delight with quiet satisfaction, or whether she was as surprised as her daughter and was hastily assembling supper for a houseful of young people, a mother catching the joyful experience life had thrown her way. I imagine her, too, in the parlor in the fading light as the afternoons shortened toward winter — playing her piano, perhaps. Did she also sing? Or simply sitting in the way that becomes possible when the day has finished and the house has settled into itself, when the children have gone upstairs and the Sheriff has retired and the evening belongs to the woman whose name provides the estate. On the northeast wall, a single door opens to the foyer and grand double pocket doors open to the dining room. The house connected to itself, room to room, in the way that a house occupied by a family connects — never entirely closed off, always permeable to the sounds and movements of the people within it.

The parlor was Julia’s room in the fullest sense. It is where her funeral would later be held, where her body would lie. But in the years before that, in the ordinary afternoons of a life she had chosen, in a house she owned, it was simply where she came to entertain, and to rest.

Through extended family connections Julia also maintained ties to Seattle’s early Native leadership. Among these was a relationship with Angeline — Kikisoblu — the eldest daughter of Chief Seattle, whose long life had extended well into the era of the city’s growth. Angeline had known Henry Yesler for decades. She had known Susan Curley. She attended Yesler’s funeral in 1892, and when they let her into his mansion afterward, she went to a corner and wept. Between Julia and Angeline there was a kinship that ran deeper than social connection — both were women the growing city knew how to invoke as symbols of its own founding story while remaining uncertain what to do with them as people, as women with full lives and hereditary standing in a world being reorganized around them. Seattle did not, in the end, take particular care of these women who carried its lineage — not Susan Curley, whose death can only be calculated backward from her daughter’s obituary, nor Angeline, whose grave in Seattle required later research to confirm, nor Julia, whose grave at Laurel Grove in Port Townsend remains unmarked and unknown.

Julia died suddenly on February 11, 1907, at age fifty-one — one moment healthy and the next dead of apoplexy following a fit of coughing. Her death certificate leaves blank the space for her father’s name, though it notes his birthplace as Ohio — it was actually Maryland — a small erasure that speaks to how carefully the fact of Henry Yesler had been managed around his daughter even in the official record of her death. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Seattle Times ran stories headlined “Daughter of Seattle Pioneer Passes Away” and “Eldest Daughter of Henry Yesler Is Dead.” In these, she is called Julia Yesler Intermela — no HB, her Duwamish ancestry now conspicuously absent. The fraction that had followed her from birth was quietly set aside in death, replaced by the father’s name alone. Which half the obituary writers chose to honor, and which they chose to omit, tells its own story.

I wonder: in what room of her home did she draw her last breath?

As I look now at my own piano — a 1911 A.B. Chase Grand I brought with me to Washington during my own emigration from Ohio more than twenty-five years ago — I wonder if someone played hymns on Julia’s piano at her funeral. Had the community gathered to mourn her also filled the house with song for her?

I know that her funeral was held in the parlor on Tuesday, February 19, at 1:30 in the afternoon — and in February, the low winter sun moving through the western sky would have reached those seven tall windows at exactly that hour, falling in long pale light across the floor, across whatever was at the center of the room. The pocket doors would have been opened to the dining room. The foyer door open as well, the whole ground floor made to flow together to hold the many people who came. According to Port Townsend’s Weekly Leader of February 20, 1907, “The services attracted a large attendance. Sorrowing friends and relatives from Seattle and other cities mingled in the grief of the bereaved family and sorrowing friends of Port Townsend, who knew and esteemed the dead woman highly.” Among them, Charles Pragge stood as one of her pallbearers and helped carry her out through the front door of the house that had been hers. Within a few years he and his wife Helen would move into the house, and Helen would wear the tea gown in the 1920s that is carefully packed in archival material at the Historical Society, preserved by someone who understood that an object can carry a life inside it — its fabric now fragile, but representing a long thread: Julia to the parlor to the pallbearer to the tea gown. It is the kind of thread this house keeps generating, as if it already knows the continuity that the people who move through it do not.

Julia was carried from the parlor to Laurel Grove. Within a year, the house — her house, the house the newspaper would record as part of her estate — was sold. The instrument of that sale was also, more than a century later, the document that finally made her visible to us.

The household dispersed. Charles Intermela remarried. Elsie made the local paper again when she eloped with a young man named Roy Price, the two of them crossing by steamship to Victoria with two other young people to marry in a double elopement that the Leader reported with evident satisfaction. Charles Jr. left home not long after — angry, family stories would later say, at his father’s second wife and at what felt like a deliberate effort to close the door on his mother’s ancestry, as if it could simply be put away and had not, in any way that mattered, been. He went north, far north, eventually settling in the mining country of British Columbia, and upon becoming a father himself named his first daughter Julia.

Over the following century the memory of the house’s first family faded entirely. Julia’s name did not appear in local histories. It was never attached to the house. The oral tradition of the house did not include her. Even among her descendants, the details of her Indigenous lineage survived mostly as fragments: a story half-remembered, something someone thought they’d once heard, a line of ancestry that someone had decided, at some point, was better left unpursued.

The two letters had done their work.

The final piece arrived for us on December 27, 2023. An employee of the Washington State Archives sent Joseph the documents that completed the house’s ownership chain — the handwritten estate sale record, the piece missing across nearly two years of searching, the name that connected the house to its first family and that told us, in the same moment, two things we had not expected: who she was, and that the house had been hers.

That she was a woman was surprising in the precise legal sense — not that a woman had been erased from history, which is an old and unsurprising story, but that a woman had owned this house outright in 1902, that it had passed through her estate, in her name. Uncommon for that era, and yet there it was in the contemporary record: her house, her estate.

What the document revealed, in full, took time to absorb. The woman we had been unable to locate — the gap at the very beginning of the house’s history — was the daughter of Seattle’s founder. The granddaughter of the brother of Chief Seattle. A woman beside whose name the territorial census had placed HB — a child reduced to a fraction — who had spent her entire young adulthood in someone else’s household across eighteen carefully managed years, who had come home at thirty-five and made a life on her own terms, who had joined the Women’s Relief Corps and the Women of Woodcraft and the Heather Circle, who had entertained with her delicate Haviland china, who had sat in her parlor in the long afternoon light and looked out through seven tall windows at the street and the neighbor’s house and the ordinary world she had chosen. And who had been so thoroughly forgotten that the address her great-granddaughter Kathie Zetterberg had been given when she first tried to find the house years earlier was a street name that no longer existed, and so led her to a modern apartment building: a dead end.

The house had outlasted her name.

On February 5, 2024, five weeks after our discovery, Joseph sent a message through Facebook: “Are you the Kathie Zetterberg who is descended from Julia Yesler? If so, my wife and I now live in her former home in Port Townsend. We are enthralled by the history of the house, especially Julia’s part in it, and we would love to connect with you.” And on Saturday, February 24, she came. She stood in the parlor — the polygonal room, the room where her great-grandmother had played piano, an heirloom from Julia that had survived the generations and now sits in Kathie’s own living room — the room where her great-grandmother had sat in the afternoon light and where her great-grandmother’s body had later lain. She passed through the pocket doors to the dining room, with its large windows. She climbed to the upper floors and looked out across the evergreen tops of trees at the view and the western sky. She brought stories and pictures. We took a picture together. It felt momentous.

What I kept returning to, standing there with her, was the distance between those two letters and the estate record.

HB beside the name of a child — placed there to locate her, to say what she was and was not, to reduce to a category what could not be reduced.

And then, in death, a newspaper accounting of her estate, her house, in her name — now as Julia Yesler Intermela, the father acknowledged at last, the Duwamish ancestry absent — passing into other hands. The same society that had written those two letters had also, through the mechanisms of property law, recorded her ownership of this place.

Both things were true simultaneously, applied by the same world to the same woman. The notation and her estate. The fraction and the house.

But Julia was not a fraction. She never was.

The parlor holds the afternoon light in the same absorbing way it always has, streaming through those seven tall windows from the west and the northwest and the southwest, casting long shadows across the floor of the room that was hers — the room where she entertained, where she rested, where she was laid out, and where one February afternoon more than a century later her great-granddaughter stood quietly and studied the architecture that once held the everyday details of a life she had spent years trying to find.

Those four west-facing windows, occupying the first-floor turret, look out in the direction of Laurel Grove Cemetery, where Julia was carried on a February afternoon in 1907. The cemetery is not visible from the house. It never was. Julia would have had no way of knowing, sitting in her parlor in the long light of an ordinary afternoon, that the windows she looked through faced the ground where she would lie.

She just sat in the light. In her room. In her house.

Sources for this essay include Washington territorial census records; Jefferson County property records; the Port Townsend Leader and Argus archives at the University of Washington Digital Collections; records of the Washington State Archives; the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Seattle Times obituary notices of February 1907; Henry Yesler’s account in The Puget Sound Gazetteer (September 1888); T.S. Phelps’ 1908 Reminiscences of Seattle: Washington Territory and the U.S. Sloop-of-War “Decatur” During the Indian War of 1855-1856; Nicholas Sheffer’s 1909 account in The Lynden Tribune; building records from the Pacific Coast Architecture Database; and genealogical research by Kathie Zetterberg, including her essay “Yesler’s Daughter,” published on HistoryLink.org.

Zhenya Lavy writes The Turret Journal from within the Adams Pragge House, an 1889 Victorian in Port Townsend, Washington, where she and her husband serve as its stewards.

The Adams Pragge House is a three-suite bed and breakfast in Port Townsend, Washington. Learn more at adamspraggehouse.com.

→ https://adamspraggehouse.com

Related essays from The Turret Journal:

• Where Uptown Begins

• On Passing Through

• The Revealing Season

In late winter the Adams Pragge House reveals the logic it was built upon — the movement of light across rooms, the structure of garden and tree, and the quiet work of a west-facing turret in Port Townsend, Washington.

The dining room faces southeast, and in late winter the sunrise finds it early.

It enters through a tripartite window — three tall double-hung sashes, seven feet high, the widest at center flanked by narrower lights on either side. The central pane is stained glass: burgundies, deep yellows, and greens, the warm colors of rooms meant for staying in. The flanking windows are antique wavy glass covered in sheer lace, and what passes through them is neither quite light nor quite pattern but something between — morning refracted softly across the crocheted cloth on the table.

On the southwest wall, a door to the porch carries its own half-light panel of stained glass in greens and yellows, a lyre at center, adding a quiet glow. The room receives light from two sides at once, each with its own character.

Fresh flowers adorn the table, pale yellow — a quieter shade in late winter than in other seasons, as if the color were conserving itself.

A life-size bronze leopard stands amid the plants before the bookcase, exchanging gazes with the portraits that observe from the walls. The deep green of the room, whose darkness the present moment has rediscovered as fashionable, is simply a color serious rooms of this era understood: libraries, dining rooms, places where one stayed long enough to think.

This is where day begins at the Adams Pragge House.

And in late winter, light makes a singular arrival.

Not the sharp ascent of summer that practically commands the day into action. This light travels inland at a low angle, diffused by marine air that settles against the peninsula overnight. On overcast mornings it can feel less like arrival than retreat — darkness withdrawing stage by stage. On clearer mornings it enters with precision. Even then, something in the atmosphere softens the edge, like an artist’s thumb smudging a charcoal drawing. The shapes cast by the lace appear, dissolve, and return again.

Outside, the house reads differently than in summer.

The brickwork out front carries a darker tone through this season — the color of masonry that has absorbed years of moisture and holds the memory of it even when dry. On the cap of one column, a small colony of succulents has established itself, producing a bright shock of green against the repeating dark columns, like punctuation.

The color of the house complements the winter sky. In winter, the pink undertones recede and a timeless chestnut prevails.

Near the front steps, two Daphne shrubs in full pale pink flower flank the approach to the porch. A third grows beneath the first-floor turret window. They have been blooming since December, their perfume a promise of the coming spring.

Not to be outdone, the rows of lavender and rosemary — not yet cut back for spring — still release fragrance when rain or a passing hand touches them.

And the willow.

While in summer she is spectacle — long pendulous branchlets sweeping low, animated by transformative green – in late winter she is structure: the trunk’s considered mass, the branching that rises before it falls, the network of limb and lesser limb that makes the summer display possible.

To see this is to understand the architecture that was always there. Summer concealed it; winter reveals it.

Late winter does something similar inside the house, as well.

The rooms change register. Summer light in the turret arrives with a certain insistence — brightness organizing the space around activity and the long momentum of the day. Late winter light enters lower and slower across the angled and curved walls, finding colors summer’s abundance keeps just out of sight: tertiary tones in plaster and painted wood, as if the very surfaces hold the memory of other seasons. The glancing light highlights the patterns carved into the wood furniture.

The room does not darken so much as deepen.

What it asks is different.

Sit. Stay.

The pace is deliberate.

Even the heat follows its own late-winter logic. From the basement, the central furnace warms the bones of the entire house each morning. Through the day warmth is conserved. The needs of the house are antithetical to open plans: heat is restricted to the rooms that will be occupied, doors and their transoms closed to prevent its escape. The halls stay cooler. Upper floors benefit from and retain what the lower have released.

The house manages itself with 136-year-old structural efficiency.

Light follows the same east-to-west path as always, but in late winter its movement clarifies purpose. The dining room holds the morning. The turret rooms on the western corner, with their windows that hug the bend, hold the afternoon and then the last of the day.

That the turret faces west merits pause.

The street grid of downtown Port Townsend and the Uptown neighborhood runs largely on the compass diagonals. Most turreted houses in Uptown occupy a north or south corner, and their turrets tend to meet the morning light, presenting their faces toward Admiralty Inlet or Port Townsend Bay.

With its westward orientation at the corner where F becomes Tyler, the Adams Pragge House turret looks instead down the gentle descent of the street into distance. This is not a harbor view but a territorial one: land and sky, and the light that collects above the horizon at the end of the day as the town’s edge gives way to the rest of the Olympic Peninsula beyond.

A west-facing turret extends the usable day.

It gathers what remains of the lingering light when the rest of the house has already let it go.

In winter, when sunset comes early and light becomes practical, the logic of this placement is restored.

From the turret at that last hour, the view is land and distance and the particular quality of late light over the Olympic Peninsula in early March — horizontal, reluctant to leave, without the urgency it carries in other seasons.

Late winter offers clarification.

The garden stripped to its shapes.
The willow to her architecture.
The light reduced to long angles that lengthen shadows even as they clarify form through the marine air.

And the turret of the Adams Pragge House turns, in late winter, toward its other work:

gathering the light that lingers, slowly and without waste, for those of us inside.

Zhenya Lavy writes The Turret Journal from within the Adams Pragge House, an 1889 Victorian in Port Townsend, Washington, where she and her husband serve as its stewards.

The Adams Pragge House is a three-suite bed and breakfast in Port Townsend, Washington. Learn more at adamspraggehouse.com.

→ https://adamspraggehouse.com

Related essays from The Turret Journal:

• Where Uptown Begins

• On Passing Through

• The Revealing Season

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Two routes carry travelers the final leg of the journey along the Quimper Peninsula into Port Townsend, each marked by a moment when the road changes name without announcement.

New visitors arrive along Sims Way, drawn forward by the long approach hugging Port Townsend Bay. The North Cascades rise in the distance beyond Admiralty Inlet, and as the road bends toward downtown, Mount Rainier appears across the water to the right on clear days. The Olympic Mountains, now behind you, complete the horizon. The town reveals itself gradually, then suddenly, as Sims Way becomes Water Street—an architectural time capsule from another era. It is a spectacular entrance, an announcement of arrival.

But there is another way in.

A quieter way, less defined by spectacle. Discovery Road begins beyond the settled edges of town and continues toward it, carrying with it the quiet logic of approach rather than arrival. As Discovery becomes F, the houses grow older, quieter, many set back behind mature gardens and established trees. The street rises. There is no sign, no vista arranged for effect. Only the gradual sense of having passed into the interior life of the town, and of coming upon what was already there.

Then, without ceremony, the house is there.

Today, its full form does not reveal itself immediately. A large limb of a mature Deodar Cedar extends over the street near the bend where F becomes Tyler, obscuring the view until the final approach. Only as you pass in front of the neighboring Stockand House and under the limb of that cedar does the full structure emerge — first rooflines, then upper windows, and finally the turret rising fully into view.

But it was not always so. When the house was built, the approach along F would have unfolded differently: the street rising gradually toward the bend, with the house positioned to meet that ascent — to stand before you at a distance, then nearer, then fully present at the moment when F resolves itself into Tyler. Its placement belongs to that earlier openness, when arrival was measured over distance — like approaching mountains — not in sudden revelation.

Not at the side of the road, but at its turning.

It was an intentional decision, that placement. Made in 1889, during Port Townsend’s years of greatest expectation, when Albert C. Adams built the house at the threshold of Uptown, where the street completes its ascent and changes course in the residential district that embodied the town’s aspirations for permanence and refinement. Adams was a drayman then, accustomed to motion — to departures measured in distance and arrivals measured in presence. The house reflects that understanding. It meets the road. It establishes the neighborhood that follows. It marks the place where Uptown begins.

People notice it differently. Some register only its height, or the curve of the turret. Some notice nothing at all, though later they may recall an awareness of something there. Some pass so frequently in their daily routines that it becomes part of the landscape itself. Others slow — perhaps not quite knowing why and perhaps surprised by the height of the structure suddenly before them — with a fleeting sense of approaching a place with its own interior gravity. Still others pause at the bend and look.

However the house is perceived, Uptown announces itself here.

For more than a century, the house has observed these moments continuously. Morning light emerging from beyond it. Winter rain settling into the grain of the wood and lifting away. Maritime air moving inland from the water below. Sunlight reflected upward from the bay and Admiralty Inlet. The long, slow weathering of years that does not diminish structure but clarifies it.

Inside, the staircase carries you upward into the tower that defines the house from the street. With each ascent, the perspective shifts. The view extends further outward along F, following the same approach that first revealed the house below. Light enters differently at each level, lingering longest in the uppermost room — the turret — where the curved enclosure gathers it more completely. From here, the movement of arrival and departure continues, as it has for generations.

It has taken us time to understand that the house does not exist apart from these arrivals. It was built for them. To stand at that bend where F becomes Tyler as the sign of arrival — a symbol of Uptown — and to welcome those arriving, whether they intend to stop or not.

We are only its current stewards.

The Turret Journal attends to the life of the house as it continues now: to notice what reveals itself slowly, and what remains quietly unchanged at the place where Uptown begins and where what lies ahead becomes visible only by continuing forward.

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Zhenya Lavy writes The Turret Journal from within the Adams Pragge House, an 1889 Victorian in Port Townsend, Washington, where she and her husband serve as its stewards.

The Adams Pragge House is a three-suite bed and breakfast in Port Townsend, Washington. Learn more at adamspraggehouse.com.

→ https://adamspraggehouse.com

Related essays from The Turret Journal:

• On Passing Through

• Beyond the Bell Tower

• The Revealing Season