A Short History of Kitsap County: Tribes, Timber, and the Navy

Before the County Had a Name

The Kitsap Peninsula has been home to the Suquamish and S'Klallam peoples for thousands of years. The Suquamish village at what is now Old Man House Park near Suquamish held one of the largest longhouses ever documented on the Salish Sea, and it was the home of Chief Seattle, the leader the city across the water is named for. He is buried at Suquamish, and both the Suquamish Tribe and the Port Gamble S'Klallam Tribe remain central to the county's life and economy today.

Sawmills and the Slaughter County Footnote

The county was carved out of King and Jefferson counties in January 1857. For its first few months it was called Slaughter County, after an Army lieutenant killed in the Puget Sound War, before residents renamed it for Chief Kitsap, a Suquamish leader.

The early economy was trees. Port Gamble, founded in 1853 by Maine lumbermen, ran its sawmill continuously for over 140 years and still looks like the New England village its founders were homesick for; it is now a National Historic Landmark. Port Blakely on Bainbridge Island once claimed the largest sawmill in the world under one roof, and Port Madison shipped lumber to San Francisco. Between the mill towns, a swarm of small steamboats nicknamed the Mosquito Fleet carried people, mail, and goods to every dock on the Sound, decades before highways or car ferries.

The Navy Century

In 1891 the Navy bought land on Sinclair Inlet and established what became Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, the deep reason Bremerton exists at its current scale. The shipyard repaired battle-damaged ships through both world wars, including vessels salvaged after Pearl Harbor, and Bremerton's population surged during WWII.

The county's naval footprint kept growing: the torpedo station at Keyport opened in 1914 (its story is told today at the free Naval Undersea Museum), and the ammunition depot at Bangor was transformed in the 1970s into the homeport for the Trident submarine fleet. Together these installations remain the county's largest employer.

One of the county's hardest chapters also deserves remembering: in March 1942, Bainbridge Island's Japanese American residents were the first community in the nation forcibly removed under Executive Order 9066. The Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial marks the dock where they left, under the words "Nidoto Nai Yoni": let it not happen again.

The County Today, Town by Town

• ✓Port Orchard: the county seat, with a historic waterfront downtown on Sinclair Inlet
• ✓Bremerton: the county's largest city, shipyard town turned arts-and-ferry city
• ✓Silverdale: the unincorporated retail and services hub at the head of Dyes Inlet
• ✓Poulsbo: founded by Norwegian immigrants in the 1880s and still celebrating it, from the downtown storefronts to Viking Fest
• ✓Bainbridge Island: a city that is also an island, 35 ferry minutes from downtown Seattle
• ✓Kingston: the north-end ferry town connecting to Edmonds
• ✓Suquamish and Port Gamble: tribal communities and a preserved mill town on the county's north end

Roughly 275,000 people live here now, on a peninsula where the drive from Hood Canal to Puget Sound takes twenty minutes and history is unusually close to the surface.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

Whether you are exploring the area or already planning a move, we are happy to help you get to know Kitsap County. Browse the Welcome to Kitsap guide for more local information, or schedule a call with the Jorge Downie Real Estate Team at KW Greater 360 here in Kitsap.

🏠 Equal Housing Opportunity | Jorge Downie, Keller Williams Greater 360 | 360-930-9004 | homes@jorgedownie.com