Percival Landing: The Dock That Made Olympia a Port
Near Olympia, Washington
Olympia sits at the southernmost navigable point of Puget Sound. In the eighteen fifties and sixties, that geography made it something. Not a city in the modern sense, not yet, but a necessary stop, a place where the steamboat routes that connected the scattered settlements of the sound had to come if they wanted to reach the territorial capital.
Captain Samuel Percival arrived in Olympia in the early eighteen fifties. He had a background in shipping and mercantile trade, and he recognized what the end of Puget Sound could be for a man in his position. In eighteen sixty, he built a dock on the waterfront. It was a commercial wharf at low tide, where the lower inlet exposed broad mudflats that made any approach by water unreliable. The dock extended the reach of the port.
Percival Dock was torn down and rebuilt several times over the following decades. It served as a hub for regional steamboat traffic for more than a century. The old docks were eventually cleared as the park took shape.
The public boardwalk and park that now occupies the site were built in phases from nineteen seventy-seven to nineteen eighty-eight. Percival Landing is now a gathering place, with moorage, public art, and interpretive signs. It has been praised as one of the region's great public spaces.
The mudflats are still there at low tide, just below the boards.
