Skagit City: A Ghost Town Killed by Its Own River
Washington
Nowhere around you was once a busy river town called Skagit City. In eighteen sixty-nine, John Barker opened a trading post on Fir Island where the South Fork Skagit River splits, and within a decade the settlement had hotels, saloons, a school, a church, a wharf, and regular steamboat service to Seattle and Port Townsend. The same logjam that made Skagit City thrive, blocking river traffic from going further upstream, also doomed it.
When workers finally cleared the jam in the mid-eighteen seventies and opened the river to Mount Vernon, trade simply moved upriver. By nineteen oh six, only one business remained. The last structures vanished after World War Two.
Today the name survives only on maps of Fir Island, marking a place that rose and fell in less than forty years because a pile of logs moved.
