by KAJETAN BULLOCK, HENRY MILLERM and NATHAN VEKVED
Did you know about Ocean – not the one with salt water, but a town called Ocean, Wash.?
It used to sit on a ledge surrounded by cliffs on the west side of Orcas Island. If you happened to stumble upon it now, you might not even notice it, but if you looked closely, you would see that it was once a busy place.
We, a small group of Orcas home school students – Kajetan Bullock and Henry Millerm – along with our teacher Ellen Winter, have been conducting an archaeological and historical investigation to try to find out more about the town and the people who lived there.
The town of Ocean was established in 1889. There is a record of a post office there from 1890 to 1894. As late as the 1960s, people could still find Serbo Croation newspapers used as wallpaper in some of the houses.
We weren’t able to find any photographs of Ocean. There are very few records that it even existed. We tried to piece together a picture of what life was like there by looking at the things that people left behind. They ate a lot of meat. Everywhere, we see large cut bones that looked like they came from cattle.
Next we looked at the ruins of some little houses, where people made rock gardens. There are even remains of a little picket fence. We found stove parts, old boots, a washtub and pieces of kerosene lanterns. We found a complete enamel plate and parts of pocket watch. A broken cut-glass pitcher made us guess there must have been women there.
Local historian Tom Welch talked to the class and gave us an idea of the workers’ lives. They were probably brought here by labor brokers who rounded up people in Europe, promised them riches and delivered them to quarry owners. They broke rock, moved rock, burned rock or cut firewood for the kilns that burned every day all day.
Men pushed heavy ore carts along rail tracks and dumped them into chutes that slid the rocks into the top of the kiln. The kiln burned four cords every day. A day’s pay was $1.50.
The town was probably abandoned around the beginning of the First World War. Many Serbs were put into internment camps along with Germans since they were then considered enemies.
Now the buildings at Ocean, Wash. have mostly rotted away. All that is left of this busy town are some rusty pieces of metal and a crumbling lime kiln. Standing on this ledge, we can almost hear the “kaboom” of dynamite, the sounds of pickaxes and rock drills, the squeaking of ore cars along their tracks and the sawing and splitting of wood.
We admire these people who lived such a rugged life and worked so hard but, when we think of the millions of trees all over the island that were cut down to produce lime, we kind of wish they had never come.
