HistoryLink Tours

This route covers an area known today as the North Waterfront, situated between the Snohomish River channel, the Grand Avenue bluff, 21st and 9th Streets. Much of this area is now part of the Port of Everett’s Waterfront Place development. A significant number of lumber and shingle mills operated here, beginning in the 1890s. These mills were constructed on pilings, which projecting westward from the base of the bluff and extending into Port Gardner Bay.

For thousands of years, Native Americans lived along the waterfront. In the 1860s, European settlers began moving to the Everett peninsula. By the 1890s, industrialists from the East Coast—such as John D. Rockefeller, Charles Colby, and Colgate Hoyt—joined Henry Hewitt from Tacoma to develop plans for the new city of Everett.

With the arrival of the Great Northern, Northern Pacific and Milwaukee Road railways, Everett boomed. Lumbermen, including Frederick Weyerhaeuser, George Bergstrom, Olof Carlson, Neil Jamison, William Marion Hulbert, Fred Baker, David Clough, Roland Hartley, and Thomas Robinson, arrived to build sawmills and shingle mills.

The waterfront grew quickly. Noise from the mill machinery, saws, belts and motors was deafening. The Everett skies were filled with smoke and cinders from the smokestacks and refuse burners. The town was sometimes advertised as the “Pittsburgh of the West”, but was more commonly and proudly known as the “City of Smokestacks”.

Most of the mills were gone by the mid 1970s in the tour area, and employment opportunities transitioned to the new Boeing 747 plant in southwest Everett. The city remained a blue-collar town and proud of it, but the mill town days were over. Only a few traces of those mills survive today. The monuments to Everett’s Mill Town days were either demolished or destroyed by spectacular fires.

The Port of Everett was established by vote in 1918. Its public marina consists of 2300 boats in three main dock and storage areas. The central docks were built in the 1960s, the south docks in the 1980s, and the north docks in 2007.

Start at the water fountain at Pacific Rim Plaza near 14th Street and Seiner Drive, a block west of Marine View Drive.

Everett Industries -- An Overview