Port Angeles: Second National City on the Strait

Port Angeles sits on the south shore of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, eighteen miles of open salt water from Victoria, British Columbia. Behind the town rise the snowcapped peaks of the Olympic Mountains. Before it stretches the strait, a busy international shipping lane that connects the Pacific Ocean to Puget Sound.

This geography made Port Angeles impossible to ignore. A Spanish naval officer named Francisco de Eliza gave the harbor its name in seventeen ninety-one, calling it Puerto de Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles, the Port of Our Lady of the Angels. The name shortened and anglicized over time, though the mountains and the water retain the grandeur that impressed the Spanish sailors.

Long before any European arrived, the Lower Elwha Klallam people had lived here for thousands of years, fishing the Elwha River, hunting the Olympic forests, and trading along a coast they had known since the last ice age. The formal beginning of the American town came in eighteen sixty-two, when President Abraham Lincoln signed an executive order setting aside more than three thousand acres on the harbor as a federal townsite and combined military and lighthouse reservation. A collector of customs named Victor Smith, who had worked aggressive political connections in Washington, had lobbied hard for this designation.

The Army Corps of Engineers platted the street grid that forms downtown Port Angeles to this day. In eighteen ninety, the Port Angeles Board of Trade seized on the Lincoln townsite designation to dub their city the Second National City, claiming a distinction shared only with Washington itself, since almost no other American city had been officially laid out by the federal government. Historians have since pointed out that the claim overstates the case, but the street grid is genuinely federal work, and Lincoln's signature is genuinely behind it.

Port Angeles grew through the timber and fishing eras, then through an industrial waterfront period dominated by pulp mills that processed Olympic Peninsula timber into paper products for export. Most of the pulp mills are gone now. The waterfront has been reimagined.

The ferry still crosses to Canada each day, and at the end of every downtown street the Olympic peaks frame a view that has not changed since the Spanish named the bay.