Edmonds: The Maine Logger Who Built a Town on Puget Sound
Near Woodinville, Washington
Edmonds was planted by a man who knew trees. George Brackett grew up working the forests of Maine and New Brunswick, and in eighteen seventy-two he bought one hundred forty-seven acres of Puget Sound waterfront timber for six hundred fifty dollars. By eighteen seventy-six he had built a cabin and started clearing the land.
Other loggers and shingle sawyers followed, and within a generation Edmonds supported four shingle mills. Brackett platted the townsite, secured a post office in eighteen eighty-four, and became the first mayor when the city incorporated in eighteen ninety. The mills ran until the last one closed in June of nineteen fifty-one.
After that, Edmonds remade itself as a waterfront arts community. The waterfront and ferry dock remain, but the giant cedars Brackett came here to harvest are long gone.
