Puget Sound Native Tree
Botanical Garden

The history of European colonization

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Bainbridge Island was likely noticed by European explorers in the 1500-1600s such as Navigator Juan de Fuca, who perhaps named the village of Chico, and George Vancouver (1792) and Sailor surveyor Charles Wilkes (1841) who named it.

 

From oral tradition recorded from Alan 'Bud' Olson:    Bud was born 100 yards to the east of Dolphin Place on the original nearby farm.  His grandfather, Charles Olson, during a famine in the early 1800s, was sold by his parents as a child to become a cabin boy to the British Navy for a barrel of salt fish.  Tired of the extra curricular duties required by his job, he jumped ship in Norfolk Virginia and walked west until he could go no further.

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The story went that he settled on the location of an abandoned village on Little Manzanita around the time of Chief Seattle's death in the 1850s.  He traded milk to the nearby Suquamish for smoked salmon.  The Olson family maintained the farm until about 1949, when it was sold to the Millers and Petersons.

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Other settlers arrived in the 1870s, drawn by rich forests for logging, establishing major mills at Port Madison and Port Blakely, attracting diverse workers (Japanese, Scandinavian, Filipino).

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Bud was born on the farm land in 1919.  He thought that the property which became Olympic Point was sold to Goodyear for the trees on the steep slopes.  He remembered that at the head of the bay was a homestead that maintained 100 oxen used to drag the massive logs down the slough that was originally a salmon creek. The hollow stumps on the the site which was to become the Botanical Garden became the homes for the 'Boom Men', rough pioneers who managed to jostle the huge logs about the bay and attach them to the steamers that dragged them to the saw mills on the other side of the island.

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Eggy Bucat, while an Eagle Scout, restocked the destroyed creek with coho salmon fry in the 1960s to help restore the fish runs.  The run had 600 fish in 2001, supported the return f eagles and otters.  A 4 foot ratfish was observed swimming up the creek at low tide in 1996, perhaps to feed on salmon eggs along with the sea run cutthroat trout.