Eighty Thousand People and Then They Left

In nineteen-forty, Bremerton was a modest company town of about fifteen thousand people. By the peak of the Second World War, the surrounding area held something closer to eighty thousand. That is not a gradual increase. That is a human flood.

The Puget Sound Naval Shipyard was the engine. Its primary wartime mission was repair: ships damaged in the Pacific, ships that needed overhauls between deployments, ships that needed to be converted from peacetime to combat configuration. The yard ran continuously, which meant it needed workers in numbers it had never required before. Workers came from across the country, drawn by shipyard wages at a moment when steady industrial work was something many families had not seen since before the Depression.

They arrived faster than the city could absorb them. Trailer camps went up in vacant lots. People shared rooms in rotation, one worker sleeping while the other worked the opposite shift. The ferry from Seattle, already busy, became a floating commuter corridor. The Navy eventually used landing ships to transport workers across the Sound. Bremerton in wartime was a place of constant motion, constant noise, constant production.

And then the war ended.

By nineteen-fifty, the population was twenty-seven thousand, six hundred seventy-eight. More than fifty thousand people had left. The bars that had served three shifts of workers went quiet. The housing that had been built fast and cheap sat half-empty. The downtown that William Bremer's family had held since the eighteen-nineties entered a long, slow slide.

The boom-and-bust pattern of a military city is not subtle. Bremerton has lived it more than once. The wartime surge of the nineteen-forties is simply the most dramatic example on record.