After the Denny family arrived and became the founders of the (future) City of Seattle in 1851, in 1852 Henry Yesler came to inspect the site of the future city and see if it was suitable for setting up a sawmill. Yesler was given land at what is now Pioneer Square in Seattle, and Yesler’s sawmill began operating at the Seattle waterfront in March 1853.
An 1895 view of ships loading lumber at Port Gamble’s mills. Photo 4960 of UW Special Collections.
Some of the other earliest-arriving white settlers in the Pacific Northwest were lumbermen from Maine who wanted to find easily accessible supplies of timber. Later in the year 1853 Yesler’s mill in Seattle was visited by ten men from Maine who were in search of a place to set up a lumbering operation. Led by Captain William C. Talbot, the men purchased heavy timber pilings from Yesler to start building a mill at their chosen site, Port Gamble in Kitsap County, across Puget Sound from Seattle.
The Port Gamble mill operations of Pope & Talbot were so successful and grew so rapidly that the operators went back to Maine on recruiting trips. The Pope & Talbot mill operators were from East Machias, Maine. It may be that this is how the Preston brothers of Dennysville, Maine, located only a few miles from East Machias, first heard about the frontier opportunities in the Pacific Northwest. In the 1860s and 1870s a total of six Preston brothers came from Maine and settled in the Seattle-to-Everett area.
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