The story of Vashon-Maury Island is told not from the perspective of any one individual, but from the perspective of the land. It is the story of how humans have shaped the island’s environment, and how the island’s ecosystems have shaped the humans who live here.
Vashon-Maury Island exists as an “imagined community.” The concept of being an islander is a concept based on a collective existence and location that people have despite the fact that they will never all know each other. Vashon-Maury Islanders describe themselves as a people distinct from other people. This unites a heterogeneous, often contentious, collection of people around a vision of what they share as islanders. It is this drama of self-identification that creates our community. Perhaps the central story of Vashon-Maury Island is this journey from a collection of self-identified separate communities, linked only by water, into a unified community that is able to collectively organize to oppose a ferry monopoly, a bridge, and a massive strip mine. What aids this process of self-identification and gives it clearly defined boundaries is the island itself. The shoreline that separates us from the “sweep of the surrounding sea” both embraces and entraps us as islanders.
The history of Vashon-Maury Islands has had few climatic moments and few heroes. This is not a history of individual accomplishments. Rather, it is a history of groups attempting to find their place in the world, to find a living, and in doing so profoundly and significantly changing the land and the resources which surround them. The daily activities that form the core of these ordinary lives, taken together over years, begin to fundamentally alter the landscape, shift the natural habitats, and change the balance of species within the biosphere. The Vashon-Maury Island we know at the beginning of the twentyfirst century is the result of millennia of Native American habitation, and, more recently, over the past one hundred and fifty years, of Euro-Asian-American impacts upon a landscape already profoundly altered by human interventions. (White, p. xiv)
Vashon-Maury Island, like other islands in Puget Sound, is peopled by groups who do not always fully understand the consequences of their impact upon the land. Indians lived on Vashon-Maury for millennia “living close to the land but profoundly alter(ing) it to serve their own ends.” Pioneer farmers dominated the early island but undermined “their own cherished success” by their farming practices. Loggers, brick makers, and shipbuilders brought successful industries to the Island but often destroyed themselves “with their own inadequate capital,” or by exhausting the resources upon which their success depended. And, in the last half of the twentieth century, urban tourists, suburban commuters, escapists, and retirees come to the Island seeking relief from urban sprawl and “access to a wild nature that conveniently conforms to their own artificial image of wilderness.” They arrive only to find they destroy the rural escape they seek with their own large numbers. All of these inconsistencies are the result of a phenomenon Patricia Limerick so aptly calls the "Daniel Boone Paradox." By opening trails into the trans-Appalachian west in order to escape what he saw as overcrowding, Daniel Boone ironically provided directions and routes for settlers who each time crowded him further and further west. Each of the groups occupying Vashon and Maury; Indians, farmers, loggers, brick makers, shipbuilders, tourists, commuters, and escapists, create their own Boone Paradox.
The history of Vashon-Maury Island reflects the important role of women, of men, of minorities, and of the land and its ecosystems. Vashon’s history is a multicultural, cosmopolitan history that reflects the presence of a diverse population of Indigenous Peoples, Asian Immigrants (Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, Vietnamese), Northern European Immigrants (Norwegians, Swedes, Germans), Southern European Immigrants (Italians, Slovakians), and Americans (both North and South). It is a history of changes in the land. A history of how, as resources were used and often depleted, the land was changed by human beings and in return how humans were changed by the land they themselves had changed.
This history of Vashon-Maury Island is organized into five distinct eras. Each era is defined by a set of circumstances or series of events which seem to close one era and set the direction for another in the ongoing saga of island life. These are contingent points, points in time at which the island’s history could go in any number of possible directions. Because of the decisions made – often unconscious or unthinking decisions – the history of the island develops as it does. The island very well could have become something different, but because of what takes place at these contingent points the island becomes what we know today.
Native People on Vashon - to 1792. The first era lasts for millennia with the coming of Native Peoples approximately 10-12,000 years ago. This Indian cycle probably began as a riverine Marpole culture based on the Puyallup River, and gradually transformed into the wider spread Salish culture by 3-5,000 years ago. We do not know when the Sho-ma-mish first came to Vashon, but the archeological evidence suggests Native People have been on Vashon for well over 1,000 years.
Contact - 1792-1870. In 1792, the second era begins when the countless generations of Sho-ma-mish Coastal Salish life based on river and sea was disrupted by the arrival of Europeans in the form of Captain George Vancouver and his expedition. Fifty years later in 1841, the third era begins when Charles Wilkes and his American Exploring Expedition visited the Puget Sound to map and often rename what earlier explorers had named. This era begins the Americanization of Vashon-Maury Island and ends with the arrival of the first permanent settlers on the Island.
Euro-Asian-American Development - 1870-1940. Americans began to claim Vashon in the 1860’s and the first settlers arrived in the 1880’s. Vashon-Maury Island was transformed in the 1890’s by an explosion of settlers, by new industries, by a college, and by a growing demand from the emerging cities of Seattle and Tacoma for the island’s natural resources. This growth continued into the first decades of the 20th Century as Vashon was heavily logged, agriculture came to dominate the Island economy , and great plans for future development were formed. The First World War and the agricultural depression of the 1920’s significantly slowed Vashon’s growth, and the arrival of the Great Depression of the 1930’s continued to see the Island population and economic growth shrink. What is most significant during this era is the transformation of the island from a frontier to an integral part of a modern industrial society. This transformation laid the framework for the present Island.
An Island Community - 1940 - Present. Beginning in the 1940’s, consciousness of Vashon-Maury Island as a unified community replaced the separate identities of local communities scattered around the Island. This common "Island Identity", and the Island’s links with the Seattle-Tacoma metropolitian area were intensified as the Island’s traditional resource based economy collapsed and was replaced with a service/commuter based economy. During this era the Island formed its own ferry district, fought hard for a bridge across Puget Sound, was changed dramatically by the cultural revolution of the 1960’s, and increasingly during the 1970’s, 1980’s and 1990’s, became a gentrified commuter haven, away from the rapid urban- and sub-urbanization of the Seattle-Tacoma metropolitan area
The Future - In the future, the explosive growth and influx of new wealth and suburban sprawl, which have come to characterized the Pacific Northwest will continue to sweep the island. What will emerge during this next era, and how future historians will characterize it, is difficult to see from the vantagepoint of the present. Yet, like each transformation of the past, the changes will significantly alter the island, but the island will channel the changes into many of the enduring patterns that have characterized past changes. Just as the abundant rainfall of the Island is channeled into the familiar gullies and streams of the island, so the changes that lie ahead will be channeled into familiar patterns.
Finally, underlying the history of Vashon-Maury Island is a series of questions that are instructive when asked about each era of Vashon’s history. Each of these questions provide insights into how the island has defined itself and how the values that characterize the island have shifted over time.
The questions are:
Who belongs on Vashon-Maury Island?
Who does Vashon-Maury Island belong to?
What do we want Vashon-Maury Island to be?
What does Vashon-Maury Island want to be?
The history of Vashon-Maury Island is found in the enduring patterns that emerge as each era provides their own unique answers to these questions.