Raab’s Lagoon, on Maury Island, has had various names, various uses and various openings over the 16,000 years since the Vashon glacier retreated and left what we know as Vashon Island behind.

The lagoon is located in the bend along the east shore of Maury Island, where Mileta Creek enters the harbor that the sHebabS Native people, who lived on the island, called Tutcila’wi, which means maples. The Vancouver (1792) and Wilkes (1841) first maps of the island do not show the lagoon, but the first survey of the island in 1858 clearly outlines the lagoon with a wide unrestricted opening.

When Euro-American settlers arrived in the 1870s, they quickly recognized the lagoon as a useful place for holding logs. Kingsbury Lagoon was the first name given to it because it was owned along with the area north to Portage (now called Kingsbury Beach) by A.C. Kingsbury. Kingsbury was a Confederate Civil War veteran, which was unusual since most of the other early male settlers on the island were Union veterans. “The Lagoon” was the name most often used to describe this inlet, but it was often referred to as “Kingsbury Lagoon” or as “Mentzer’s Log Pond” because it was used to hold logs waiting to be milled at the Mentzer sawmill located at the south entrance to the lagoon. The Mentzer sawmill was moved in the 1910s to where Dockton Park is located today, when it was sold to the Pankratz Lumber Company.

The lagoon seems to have been first closed in with a causeway and bridge built across the entrance in the late 1890s when crews from the Dockton dry dock and shipyards, led by Peter Manson, constructed the first causeway at Portage and at the lagoon to create a water level road to Dockton. The road, named George Edwards Road, after a resident at Portage, ran along the beach (what is now called Kingsbury Beach) across the lagoon and the along the beach past Mileta Creek and all the way along the west shore of Maury Island to Dockton. This route quickly proved impracticable because of high tides and constant landslips. Within a few years, the road was moved inland, and after crossing the lagoon went south to Mileta Creek, where it climbed inland and met what is now Dockton Road at the corner of 240th SW.

The 1932 photo of King County Road No. 274 shows the causeway and bridge across the Lagoon headed east with the lagoon on the left and the harbor on the right. The unpaved road curves south after crossing the causeway and bridge and follows the shoreline to Mileta Creek. The road across the lagoon was largely unused once the new Dockton Road was constructed in 1923, and the road along Kingsbury Beach was abandoned in 1938 in favor of what is now called Kingsbury Road, much to the relief of beach dwellers.

In the late 1930s, Harriet and Lloyd Raab moved to Vashon. In the early 1950s, they purchased most of the south shore of the lagoon, which led islanders to begin to refer to it as Raab’s Lagoon, the name that is still generally used today. Lloyd Raab was an island businessman who owned the Ford dealership in Vashon Town and was one of the partners in building the “new” Vashon Theatre in 1947 after the original theater burned. It was Lloyd Raab who hired Jac Tabor to paint the murals in the Vashon Theatre and reportedly “paid” for the murals by trading Tabor a 1948 yellow Oldsmobile convertible.

In 1958, the State of Washington, Department of Wildlife decided to turn Raab’s Lagoon into a salmon-rearing pond. They constructed a dam across the opening where the Dockton Road bridge had once been. The next year the state stocked the lagoon with 23,000 chinook salmon fingerlings, and then in October after the chinook had left, stocked 78,000 more salmon fingerlings in the lagoon. In October 1961, they pumped 44,000 more salmon fingerlings into the lagoon. The effort never really worked to re-establish salmon runs in Quartermaster Harbor, but, in 1962 a 36-pound river otter was caught in Raab’s Lagoon, obviously drawn there by the state supplied free meals.

Now, the lagoon is surrounded by homes and pastures, the ends of the causeway are still there, but the bridge is long gone, burned in the 1950s to allow boats access to the lagoon, at least at high tide. The remnants of the salmon pond dam are still visible in the Terry Donnelly photograph, and the rips created as the tide floods or ebbs in the lagoon, called Vashon Rapids, are a favorite for those brave enough to ride the rips on paddle boards or kayaks. It is also a favorite for intrepid water skiers to scream into the lagoon, make a tight fast turn and scream back out in less time than it takes to tell.

In 2008, after a three-year effort by The Vashon-Maury Island Land Trust, King County and the Cascade Land Conservancy, as part of the much larger Vashon Island conservation initiative, 15 acres at the mouth of the lagoon and a parcel on the lagoon’s north shore were purchased to create the Raab’s Lagoon Preserve. State Senator Sharon Nelson, County Executive Dow Constantine, lagoon resident Annie Roberts and a group of islanders called Vashon Gardeners worked together to make the land purchases possible. Efforts to plant native Olympia oysters in 2007 (some current real estate listings refer to the lagoon as “Oyster Slough”) and native plants along the shoreline in 2012 have helped begin restoring the lagoon.

Take time to visit this historic part of Vashon. Standing on the causeway at the end of Kingsbury Road, you can visualize much of the history of Quartermaster harbor from the shipyards and dry dock at Dockton; to the various steamer docks at Dockton, Mileta, Kingsbury, Quartermaster and Newport; to the sawmill at the end of the Burton Peninsula, and the path of the waterfront road to Dockton.

— Bruce Haulman and Terry Donnelly