The Deal That Built a City

On a spring morning in April of eighteen ninety-one, a German immigrant named William Bremer signed over one hundred ninety acres of Sinclair Inlet shoreline to the United States Navy. The price was fifty dollars per acre. He had paid two hundred dollars per acre to acquire it.

On its face, it looked like a ruinous transaction. Bremer had lost three hundred thousand dollars in today's terms without apparent hesitation. What he understood, and what the Navy perhaps did not fully appreciate until later, was that the real money was not in the land itself. It was in everything that would grow up around it.

The Navy had sent a commission to find the best site for a Pacific Coast shipyard. The commission toured harbor after harbor from California northward. It landed on Point Turner, on the southern shore of Kitsap Peninsula, and declared it the ideal location in the Pacific Northwest. The water was deep enough for the largest warships of the day, the inlet protected enough to work in almost any weather, the surrounding land undeveloped enough that a shipyard could expand without obstruction.

Bremer had been watching. He and his brother-in-law Henry Hensel bought the land first, then offered it to the Navy at a loss. The logic was simple: where the Navy builds, workers follow. Where workers follow, they need housing, groceries, hardware, banking, saloons, and churches. Bremer already owned the surrounding commercial property. The fifty-dollar-per-acre land was his advertisement.

The city that grew up was named for him. It incorporated in nineteen-oh-one, ten years after the handshake, with a man named Alvyn Croxton as its first mayor. By the time the First World War arrived, the shipyard employed more than four thousand workers, and the city around it had grown into one of the most purely Navy-dependent municipalities in the United States. William Bremer's arithmetic, it turned out, was flawless.