Ebey’s Landing State Park – state parks quest #20

Ebey’s Landing State Park was not on our radar when we met friends from British Columbia for a day hike on Whidbey Island. After an excellent lunch of Penn Cove mussels at Coupeville’s Front Street Grill, we headed over to the Ebey’s Prairie trailhead. Our goal was the three-mile Bluff Trail, a spectacular loop that takes hikers high and low along Admiralty Inlet, which connects the Strait of Juan de Fuca to Puget Sound. Approaching the signage at the trailhead, we assumed that we were in a national park site. We were surprised to find that it’s part of Ebey’s Landing National Historical Reserve, a patchwork of land designations of which Washington State Parks is a key part.

The first Ebeys arrive

Walking from the trailhead toward the bluff, we followed the Ebey’s Prairie Trail past the Jacob and Sarah Ebey House. The trail follows the boundary between land claims filed in the 1850s by Isaac Ebey and his father, Jacob. Isaac Ebey is an important figure in Washington territorial history. Coming from Missouri in 1848 at the behest of his friend Samuel Crockett, Ebey bounced around the Northwest before settling on Whidbey Island in 1851. Isaac recognized the area’s strategic location. It boasted excellent farmland, a temperate climate, and proximity to the new settlement of Port Townsend, six miles away across Admiralty Inlet at the entrance to Puget Sound.

Ebey arrived at a propitious time. Congress had passed the Donation Land Claim Act in September 1850. Designed to incentivize white settlement of the West and strengthen the U.S. hold on its young territories there, the Act allowed single white men to claim 320 acres of land. Married couples could claim 640 acres (one square mile), of which half was registered in the wife’s name. One of the first laws that allowed women to hold property in their own name, the Act was a tacit acknowledgment of women’s importance in settling the West. Once they’d lived on and improved the land for four years, claimants received clear title to the acreage. 

Less than a month after the Act became law, Isaac Ebey took advantage of the opportunity, filing a claim on prime agricultural land now known as Ebey’s Prairie. His wife, Rebecca, and their two young sons arrived in 1852. Just over a year later, Rebecca died, and in early 1856 Isaac remarried, to a local widow with a young daughter. Marriage was as much a matter of practicality as affection. Isaac needed someone to take care of the home front and look after his young sons, because he was a busy man.

Isaac Ebey, man in a hurry

Besides farming, Ebey served as territorial legislator from Thurston County, which at the time extended to the Canadian border. He urged the territorial legislature to sign the Monticello Memorial, the successful 1852 petition by settlers north of the Columbia River to carve a separate Washington Territory from Oregon. 

New Washington territorial governor Isaac Stevens designated Ebey as customs collector, a lucrative job that Ebey sought to help support his farm. Once appointed, Ebey promptly moved the customs office from faraway Olympia (the territorial and, later, state capital which Ebey himself named for the mountains visible from its waterfront) to Port Townsend, directly across Admiralty Inlet from his claim on Whidbey Island. 

To facilitate commercial traffic from Port Townsend, an important harbor known as the “key city to Puget Sound,” Ebey built a dock on his land claim, at a spot where the prairie sloped gently to the beach. The first ferry between Port Townsend and Ebey’s Landing was operated by Captain Thomas Coupe, for whom Coupeville is named. The landing was used until the early 20th century, when a new dock was built on the far side of Admiralty Head, three miles southwest. That spot is still the main point of entry to central Whidbey Island from the Olympia Peninsula; we took the ferry there from Port Townsend to get to Ebey’s Landing.

In three short years, Isaac Ebey had claimed the best farmland on Whidbey Island, built a boat dock to encourage commercial shipping, been appointed customs collector, named Olympia for the mountains visible from its waterfront, championed the new Washington Territory, and been elected colonel of the territorial volunteer militia. Now he wanted the rest of his family to come to Whidbey, a place he called “almost a paradise of nature.”

Paradise, cultivated

We followed the trail to the bluff, pausing to admire the views in every direction. The gorgeous January sun slanted off the water, shifting its color from steel to jade to navy blue. Moody clouds wandered the sky. An eagle wheeled above the evergreens atop the bluff. Port Townsend and the Olympic Peninsula hunkered gray on the horizon, mountains hidden under the clouds that wrapped the higher reaches like a cozy blanket.

Central Whidbey Island is climatically distinct. Situated in the rain shadow of the Olympic Mountains, it receives half the annual rainfall of the rest of the island. Long before Ebey laid eyes on its prairies, others extolled their elysian quality. Peter Puget, a lieutenant on Captain George Vancouver’s 1792 expedition that mapped Puget Sound, noted the “beautiful lawns” on “as fine a tract of land as I have ever saw.” Territorial governor Isaac Stevens deemed Whidbey the “garden of the territory.”

It was indeed a garden, and like all gardens it was intentionally managed, in this case by people who had lived there for thousands of years. Although it’s unlikely Ebey or any other settler recognized the prairie as a cultivated landscape, it was an anthropogenic prairie, “grassy lowland openings in the forest-dominated landscape…maintained and enhanced by people.”

This relatively small area, so attractive to settlers, had possibly the densest population of native peoples in the Northwest, perhaps 1,500 people before contact. Mostly members of Lower Skagit groups, they camped seasonally on the beach and in the uplands, relying on the area’s abundant resources, including fish, shellfish, game, fowl, and plants. The prairie looked like perfect farmland to white explorers and settlers because indigenous peoples had been farming there for thousands of years, cultivating bracken fern and camas for food. They set fires to keep trees from encroaching and encourage new growth. They tilled the ground to encourage blue-flowered camas, whose edible bulbs eaten after roasting, to grow large and sweet. In the 1840s, just before Isaac Ebey arrived, S’Klallam peoples had begun growing potatoes along a small crescent of prairie near the edge of the bluff. What Ebey saw as a “paradise of nature” was Eden, long occupied and farmed.

Along the bluff

We followed the narrow track through winter-gold grass along the bluff, the slope dramatically dropping a couple hundred feet to the water a couple. This part of the trail hugs the boundary of the Robert Y. Pratt Preserve, managed by The Nature Conservancy.

Tiny figures walked along the coastline below, on what appeared to be a spit of land that revealed itself as connected to the mainland on both ends. Zig-zagging down the bluff, we reached sea level and began picking our way back along the rocky beach surrounding Perego’s Lagoon, a shallow pool circumscribed by a closed or looped spit. Storm waves bring saltwater (and lots of driftwood) into the lagoon.

Depending on the tide, you can walk on the beach or the landward side of the spit, following it back to its connection with the main beach. A rare coastal wetland, Perego’s Lagoon is managed by Washington State Parks as part of Fort Ebey State Park, just northwest. The Pacific Northwest National Scenic Trail connects Fort Ebey to the lagoon and thus to Ebey’s Landing State Park and beyond, but is only hikeable when tides permit.

More Ebeys, more land claims, fewer natives

In 1854, eight more Ebeys joined Isaac and his family on Whidbey Island. As typical pioneers seeking to improve their fortunes, the Ebey family found paradise in the sweeping prairies seemingly custom-made for farming. Along with Isaac’s parents Jacob and Sarah, three siblings, a cousin, and a niece and nephew, the Ebeys held claim to much of what is now called Ebey’s Prairie. By the time the Donation Land Claim Act expired in 1855, most of the good farmland on central Whidbey had been claimed.

While the Ebeys benefited from their claims, indigenous people suffered. Loss of traditional territory was a key factor in the displacement of native peoples whose populations had already been decimated by diseases brought by white explorers and settlers.

It seems likely the Ebeys did not fully comprehend how indigenous peoples maintained the farmland the settlers claimed. They reported small groups of native people occasionally camped nearby and gathered resources, including camas and shellfish. Settlers along Puget Sound shorelines also saw parties of Northwest Coast natives journey south on raiding expeditions. Confrontations between whites and natives increased in the mid-1850s, exacerbated by natives’ resentment of treaties that forced them off traditional lands and onto reservations.

Isaac Ebey’s role as colonel in the local militia, and the blockhouse he constructed  with his father, speak to the tensions during this time. Jacob Ebey built his house on the ridge above the prairie in 1856 and, with Isaac’s help, added the blockhouse in 1857. Later that year, Isaac Ebey’s reputation transformed from eminent pioneer to tragic hero.

Isaac Ebey’s death 

In 1857, a group of native peoples from the north, probably from the Kake tribe of southeast Alaska Tlingits, arrived on Whidbey Island seeking revenge. The previous year, 27 members of the tribe, including a chief, had been killed in a conflict with the U.S. Navy at Port Gamble, about 25 miles south. Northwest Coast culture required the death of a prominent white man in exchange for the death of a prominent chief. Although the natives were looking for a different man, they found Isaac Ebey instead. They killed him and, per custom, took his head as a trophy of war. 

News of Ebey’s gruesome death spread quickly, inflaming settlers’ fears of violent encounters with native people. On Whidbey, although no one else had been killed, settlers hastily constructed several more blockhouses.

The violence of his death, and his prominent role in the territory, virtually guaranteed that Isaac Ebey would be mythologized. For more than a century, he was. More recent research has contextualized Ebey’s death within the larger picture of the decimation and displacement of native peoples and white settlement, and the inevitable conflicts that ensued. Once depicted as a rugged individualist in the Great Man mode of history, Ebey is better understood as part of the forces that transformed the country in the 19th century, helping secure the United States’ geopolitical expansion in the Pacific Northwest.

Hey, a state park! 

We walked along the beach, admiring the winter sun refracted by the water and pointing out kelp and interesting rocks on the sand. Arriving at a small parking lot, Mr. Adventure and I realized we’d arrived at another state park, though we hadn’t planned on it. The parking lot and trail up the bluff is Ebey’s Landing State Park.

“Wait,” I said. “Weren’t we in Ebey’s Landing National Historical Reserve?” The signs we’d seen thus far had featured the National Park Service arrowhead. I was confused. How did this fit in?

The first National Historical Reserve

By the end of the nineteenth century, resource extraction, especially logging and fishing, reshaped Whidbey Island. Although agriculture remained an important part of the island’s economy, by the 1960s farming was no longer a reliably profitable enterprise. Over the decades, Ebey’s Prairie had been passed down and sold, and the owners of part of the prairie applied to have it rezoned from agricultural to rural residential. They hoped to sell lots to developers or city folk looking to build a second home overlooking Admiralty Inlet. Some local residents, alarmed by the prospect of shrinking beachfront access and obstructed water views, banded together to try to prevent development. The history of the preservation effort is long and complicated, and like many such stories features hurt feelings, hard choices, and tough compromises. 

For our purposes, it’s enough to know that what started as an effort to prevent development evolved into an effort to protect a “cultural landscape,” a place that contains visible patterns of settlement and use and reflects values and attitudes about that place. In 1978, with a final push from Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson — without whom we would not have North Cascades National Park or the National Historic Preservation Act, among other treasures — Congress created Ebey’s Landing National Historical Reserve. The first of its kind in the nation, it “provides an unbroken historical record from nineteenth century exploration and settlement in Puget Sound to the present time.” That record encompasses Captain George Vancouver’s 1792 expedition that charted and named Whidbey Island, the transformations wrought by the arrival of the Ebeys and other whites in the 1850s, and the growth of Coupeville, an important shellfish producer and seaport, since 1883. 

The reserve stretches from Fort Ebey on the north to Fort Casey and Keystone Spit on the south, and across the island to include the town of Coupeville. The boundaries follow original donation land claims held by early settlers. At 17,512 acres (4,330 of which is Penn Cove), it is enormous. If you visit central Whidbey Island, you will spend much of your time in Ebey’s Landing National Historical Reserve. In fact, we realized, we’d spent our entire day there, from arriving by ferry, to our lunch of mussels in Coupeville, to our hike on bluff and beach, and ending with our post-hike cookies and coffee at the Little Red Hen Bakery back in Coupeville.

Ebey’s Landing National Historical Reserve is a “partnership park,” a joint effort of the National Park Service, Washington State Parks, the town of Coupeville, and Island County. About 15 percent is managed by federal, state, or local entities, and 85 percent is privately owned. It contains three state parks (Ebey’s Landing, Fort Ebey, and Fort Casey), four county parks, and three town parks, as well as three National Park Service sites. The reserve is managed by the Trust Board, a nine-member group composed of one representative from the National Park Service, one from Washington State Parks, three from Coupeville, and four from Island County, three of whom must live within the reserve. 

To maintain the rural character and where funding has allowed, the National Park Service has purchased development rights, conservation easements, and scenic easements. Maintaining the reserve’s historical context and sense of place while operating within constant change and under the pressure of a million visits each year is the central management challenge.

Ebey’s Landing

I didn’t understand all this when we read the weather-scarred interpretive panels near the Ebey’s Landing State Park parking lot. I’m sure most of the reserve’s million annual visitors don’t understand it either. But researching it at home after the fact, I am astounded at the vision and persistence that brought the reserve into existence and sustains it today. Ebey’s Landing State Park is a small but key element of this vision. In addition to offering the only beachfront parking in the reserve, the state park provides access to the landing and its history, including the nearby Ferry House. Which brings us back to the Ebeys.

After Isaac Ebey’s death, his traumatized wife and her daughter left the prairie, leaving his sons with his first wife in the care of Ebey relatives. In 1860, to create a source of support for the boys, Isaac’s brother and cousin built what is now the Ferry House, about 1,000 feet from Ebey’s Landing. A waystation for those arriving by boat and needing transportation into the island’s interior, the building served as a tavern, store, and post office.

The Ferry House’s location was no accident. Positioned next to a freshwater stream, the house sits atop a site used by native peoples long before the Ebeys arrived. Excavations at the house site, conducted during rehabilitation of the structure, show evidence of food preparation areas. Some archaeological evidence found there dates to 10,000 years ago. A village site at nearby Ebey’s Landing was abandoned by the time the Ebeys settled the prairies.

Today, the house seems isolated, cut off from charming Coupeville and the current ferry terminal. It’s not visible from the parking lot or beach at Ebey’s Landing State Park. But during Ebey’s time, the Ferry House would have been an important center of commerce and society. 

Because of its fragile state, access to the house is restricted. The National Park Service offers guided tours a few times each summer, advance booking required.

Back up the bluff

I walked up the road to get a photo of the state park sign, and we crossed the parking lot and rejoined the trail leading up the bluff’s gentle slope. We passed a sign announcing we were leaving state parks property and continued onto a flatter area.

Ebey’s Prairie, neatly tilled and mown into strips of green and gold, stretched away on the right. Prisms of sunlight bounced off the water to the left. It is a landscape of almost overwhelming beauty, one that, I think, is impossible to fully appreciate without some understanding of the thousands of years of human activity that have shaped it.

Fast facts about Ebey’s Landing State Park

• 45-acre day-use park with small parking lot and beach access
• interpretive signage
• hiking, surf fishing, beachcombing, birdwatching
• vault toilet
• $10 daily parking pass (buy the annual Discover Pass, a bargain at $30)
• Ebey’s Landing is not listed as a separate state park on the Washington State Parks website, so there’s no map per se. But this trail map includes an overview of the reserve, including Ebey’s Landing.