By BRUCE HAULMAN and TERRY DONNELLY
For The Beachcomber
We as islanders are so used to having a ferry dock at both the north and south ends of the island that it is hard to imagine that the first ferry to carry automobiles to Vashon was located in the middle of the island, on the east side, between Portage and Ellisport at the site of the Vashon Park District’s Tramp Harbor Dock.
In 1916, King County completed the brick Seattle-Des Moines Highway, and to take advantage of the new road, the county opened automobile ferry service to Vashon from Des Moines. The Vashon ferry dock was built between Portage and Ellisport, both of which already had Mosquito Fleet steamer docks.
To access the new ferry dock, what is now Dockton Road SW was built along the waterfront from Portage to Ellisport. Before this road was built, the road ran up over the hill following the route of what is now Tramp Harbor Road.
To carry automobiles from Des Moines to Vashon, King County built a new ferry and christened it the Vashon Island. This was the first diesel automobile ferry on Puget Sound.
By making the ferry part of the King County Road System, the county established an early precedent of considering ferries marine highways. This is a concept that still works today with the Washington State Ferries system.
However, the Portage-Des Moines ferry was short lived. The long drive from Des Moines to Seattle led islanders to request service to Seattle using the Marion Street dock next to Colman Dock in downtown Seattle. The Portage-Des Moines ferry was abandoned in 1922 in favor of the more convenient Vashon Heights- Harper (just north of Southworth) – Marion Street ferry route, when a new concrete highway was constructed in the early 1920s. The concrete highway linked Vashon Town to the Heights ferry dock and was named the Leif Hamilton Scenic Highway after a King County councilman.
In 1925, the Fauntleroy dock became a fourth point on the Heights-Harper-Seattle-Fauntleroy route, as roads in West Seattle quickly improved and automobiles became more available. The debate between using the Marion Street dock in Seattle and the Fauntleroy dock continued into the 1930s. A poll of islanders in 1939 favored the Fauntleroy dock because it meant more frequent service. As a result, ferry service from Vashon to the downtown Seattle Marion Street dock was dropped, and Vashon lost automobile ferry service to downtown Seattle.
The former Portage ferry dock was converted to an oil dock to bring petroleum products to the islands when the Standard Oil Company leased the dock from King County in 1922. The landing platform for the first ferry dock and the current picnic area just to the north of the dock was constructed to accommodate an oil tank storage area with six large bulk storage tanks, a fuel/oil dispensing station, and a garage/storage building. Standard Oil delivered bulk gasoline, kerosene, lube oil, motor oil, and diesel to service stations, gasoline stations and farmers on the islands.
The dock was reconstructed in 1939, and from 1960 through 1965, Boeing used the Standard Oil bulk fuel facility to re-fuel hydrofoils during test runs on Puget Sound.
In the mid-1980s, Standard Oil stopped using the pier, and the fuel storage site was demolished. King County, which still owned the dock, converted it to a public fishing pier. In 1995, King County deeded the pier to The Vashon Park District, which renamed it Tramp Harbor Dock.
The original photograph, taken by Norman Edson, (top photo) was taken in either 1921 or 1922. Edson arrived on Vashon in 1921 and in 1922 King County cancelled the Portage- Des Moines Ferry. In the Edson photograph, the ferry Vashon Island is seen leaving the dock; the Ellisport Hotel can be seen above the ferry dock bridge, and the Ellisport Store can be seen just above the end of the ferry wing wall pilings.
At the time of the photo, Ellisport was still developing as a residential community with houses visible above the ferry. The building at the end of the dock, next to the road, was the Allison Garage, a Buick and Marquette (Canadian-badged Buicks) distributor and automobile repair shop.
In the 2011 photograph, a riprap bulkhead and the newly constructed roadway at the fishing pier have replaced the wooden plank and piling bulkhead in the original photograph. The Tramp Harbor Dock has been modified and upgraded, and the land-side end of the ferry dock, where the structures in the original photograph are located, has been filled in to create the picnic area where the oil storage tanks were located.
Ellisport is much more fully developed as a residential community, although the hotel and store buildings no longer exist.
— Terry Donnelly is a landscape photographer. Bruce Haulman is an island historian.
