Orcasional Musings | Friday Harbor? Why’s it called that?

||| ORCASIONAL MUSINGS BY STEVE HENIGSON |||

Our illustrious Editor recently asked me to write a short essay on what happened on Orcas Island during the very brief, but not really unpleasant, little dust-up that history calls The Pig War. In June of 1859, a settler from the United States who lived on San Juan Island shot a pig which belonged to a British subject who lived nearby. Britain and the United States almost came to blows over the affair, but then it was settled amicably.

I did some research, and found the truth: Absolutely nothing happened, here on Orcas. Why? Because hardly anyone lived here at the time.

However, nine years later, one notable person did become an Orcasian. In 1868, the U.S. Customs Inspector for San Juan Island, Mr. Paul K. Hubbs, decided that his San Juan Town neighborhood was getting much too crowded with boisterous people who just would not leave him alone. He quit his job and moved to Orcas, and settled on the shore of a small cove off Harney Channel.

Nobody lived anywhere near his new home, but still he wasn’t left alone. Hubbs owned the only tool sharpener on Orcas: a foot-pedal-powered, rotating grindstone. Soon, anybody on the island who had a dull knife or axe just sort of dropped in, and, before he could do anything about it, his little cove had became famous as Grindstone Harbor. You may have heard of it, since it’s right next to where one of our ferries became “Elwha on the Rocks” in 1983, when its captain was showing island scenery, close-up, to his lady friend.

Hubbs was not alone in his disdain for San Juan Town, a place which had become well known as a center for drinking, gambling, and general depravity. A few of the more upright residents of San Juan Island got together and decided to create a new main settlement just a couple of miles north, on the shore of a beautiful and protected harbor.

There was already one settler there, a Kanaka, an imported worker from Hawai’i, who had been grazing sheep on land he had never legally claimed. The upright citizens soon ran him off, purchased all the land, and platted out a town. But the town and its anchorage were named after that sheepherding Hawai’ian anyway. His name was Joe Friday, so we have Friday Harbor as our County Seat.

It’s always interesting to see what my dragnet will pull in. And they’re just the facts, ma’am. Just the facts.