Deep Focus, Part I: The Joe Williamson Photographic Collection

Joe Williamson: sailor, photographer and collector. 

Photo, circa 1940; photographer unknown.

Joe Williamson is a name often associated with the photographs of the Puget Sound Maritime Collection, but who was Joe, what is his collection, and how did it transform the Puget Sound Maritime Historical Society?

Wikipedia labels Joe “Sailor and Photographer.” In his lifetime, much of it spent on the water, Williamson documented a wide swath of Northwest history with his camera, yet he does not garner the name recognition of Darius Kinsey, Joseph Scaylea, or the Curtis brothers. Perhaps this is because he himself did not consider photography his primary vocation. Photography was the means to an end and that end was spending as much time as possible on and around boats.

In his lifetime Williamson did everything from delivering photo orders by motorcycle for Bartell Drugs to running a darkroom to patrolling for fish pirates off the coast of Alaska. He traveled throughout the Northwest, wherever water could take him. And he took a lot of photos. In later days, he held court at a small photography shop close to the Seattle waterfront.

We’ll have more on Williamson’s storied and multifaceted career in future posts. Today we will focus on his photo collection and what became of it.

CHALLENGE

Joe collected maritime images and by the time of his retirement had amassed a collection of more than 60,000 prints and negatives. Exact numbers are hard to obtain, but it appears that about half the collection consists of photos Williamson took himself and the other half is made up of images purchased from other photographers or outlets. The sum includes 3,000 glass plate negatives acquired from the Webster & Stevens commercial photography company. A number of the images in the collection date to the late 19^th century.

Williamson was aware of the value of his collection. In fact, he had set himself a very specific dual life-goal: to document maritime life and to build an asset that would serve to help fund his retirement. In 1979, at the age of 70, he offered the entire collection up for sale. The asking price: $50,000 ($163,000 in today’s dollars.) The San Francisco Maritime Museum was quick to make an offer, but Williamson hoped to conclude a sale with Puget Sound Maritime Historical Society, the organization he had helped found in 1948.

Board vice president (soon to be president) Jim Cole remembers vowing aloud that the collection would not leave Puget Sound. The board had had enough of the better funded and more pro-active San Francisco Maritime Museum cherry-picking maritime artifacts from their backyard. Cole soon realized that his statement meant he was volunteering to lead the effort to raise the funds needed.

For the first time in the life of the Society the board jumped into the deep waters of fundraising to raise the $50,000 purchase price. Because of his close personal association with the group, Williamson allowed the group a year to reach this goal. Led by Cole, the board reached out to their membership and beyond, contacting old friends in the maritime trades and sending letters to businesses and foundations in the area.

Jim Cole remembers the challenge:

We talked about how we were going to do this. I had never done this kind of thing. We did send letters out. There was a lot of word of mouth activity. My late wife, Myrna, typed 180 letters to companies here.

A promise of $5,000 from H.W. McCurdy lent impetus to a campaign that was slow gaining momentum. Several companies made sizable donations, but the vast majority of the 476 gifts received came from individuals. It took nearly the entire year, but the group made their goal with enough to spare to purchase filing cabinets to house the collection.

Williamson's photo of a "Tugboat Annie" race, probably the 1940 event in Tacoma Harbor held in conjunction with the premier of the second Tugboat Annie movie, Tugboat Annie Sails Again.

CELEBRATION

As PSMHS zeroed in on its goal in the spring of 1980, the Museum of History and Industry, the Society’s partner and home base, showcased the collection in its Maritime Gallery (aka the Joshua Green-Dwight Merrill wing). The exhibit included 60 images along with ships models and other maritime artifacts. Jim Cole recalls that the exhibit opened with ceremony:

‘Mac’ McCurdy was going to cut the ribbon and he wanted Myrna to assist him. I said I’ll talk to her. She said “No, I’m not doing that.” I reported to him, and he said “She’ll do it!” I asked her a couple more times. She still said no. Well the night of the opening Mac makes this nice speech. There was a crowd there. And then he says “I would like to ask Mrs. Cole to help me cut the ribbon,” and that woman said “I would love to!” 

TRANSFORMATION

The huge Williamson Collection became the centerpiece of the PMSHS archives, which to that date had owned only a few small photographic collections to supplement its ships plans, models, and books. Acquisition of the wide-reaching collection transformed the PSMHS archives from a little known resource to an important and recognized repository of maritime history.

It transformed the Society in other ways, as well. Collection management became more than an abstract concept. Once PSMHS had taken possession of the thousands of prints and negatives, the real work began. 

-- Eleanor Boba

Sources:  

The corporate records of the Puget Sound Maritime Historical Society; interview with Jim Cole, 2/23/15; McDonald, Lucile. “The Famous Williamson Photo Collection.” The Sea Chest Dec. 1979; Hemion, Austen. “Joe D. Williamson.” The Sea Chest June 1994; The Seattle Times Historic Archive. Special thanks to Karl House and Judy Kebbekus, PSMHS volunteers.

Picnic Point Mystery Vessel

Long-time PSMHS member Joe Baar asks if anyone can offer insights as to the identity of an abandoned vessel in Puget Sound.

The wreck in the photo is located approximately 800 yards north of Picnic Point, on the east shore of the entrance to Possession Sound, almost due east of Possession Point on Whidbey Island. (See the boxed icon on the right side of the NOAA chart above.) Just south of this site is an unnamed but inhabited point of land projecting westward from the Burlington Northern Santa Fe right-of-way.

The hull is of wood construction and I don’t believe it was a barge. It appears to have been a twin-screw vessel, perhaps a freighter. Part of a shaft strut is just visible above the water, below the red sign posted at the deck line on the port quarter. The stern is round or elliptical in plan at the main deck. The hull’s forward end incorporates quite a lot of steel, both along the sheer line and in way of the hawse. I estimate the vessel’s length between 200 and 300 feet. The hull’s shape reminds me of something L.H. Coolidge or H.C. Hanson might have designed for military resupply service to Alaska during World War II.

I remember the vessel’s first appearance at this location during the early 1950s when I used to travel to Wenatchee on the train that passes close to the east of this site.

This wreck and another submerged one are marked on nautical charts of this area; Google satellite view shows at least five skeletal vessel remains on this beach, and it appears the wreckers failed to burn only this one for the metal.

These photos are dated August 20, 2010. Any help in identifying the vessel can be noted in the comments section below, and is much appreciated!

-- Joe Baar

Joe Baar has been fascinated with ships since his childhood on Brace Point. His lifelong avocation has included stints with the Sea Explorers, small-boat school courtesy of the U.S. Army, working on yachts on Lake Union, and amassing a large collection of maritime books.

Treasure Trove

The community of St. Michael, c. 1906. What appears to be water is frozen harbor ice.

Photographer unknown.

The Puget Sound Maritime Historical Society recently completed digitization of a unique group of primary historical records. The "Fragmentary Records of The Custom House of St. Michael, Alaska, 1894-1917" is now available to read via computer without risk of damage to the original documents.

Why is this important? The small island Alaskan community of Fort St. Michael, once a Russian trading post, then an American military site, sat close to the mouth of the Yukon River. As such it became the port of embarkation for miners headed up the Yukon River to the gold fields during the Gold Rush of 1897, as well as smaller strikes prior. In this chaotic period of marine traffic, the Customs House was a vital player in maintaining US law and order in a remote enclave.

A number of documents salvaged from the shuttered customs house found a home at PSMHS. In the early 1960s PSMHS member William Taylor, himself a traveler on the Dawson Trail as a boy, organized the material in a bound volume and provided a detailed historic overview in order to place them in context.

The document shown is a request for information to be used in a dispute over a "seaman's wages." 

MINING THE DOCUMENTS

The correspondence and records, both typed and hand-written, offer a window into life during this frenetic period of boom and bust. In amongst the routine matters of import, export, accidents, and taxation are glimpses of human drama:

There is a plea for special assistance from a miner “since I have already been so unfortunate as to have been blown into the Yukon.”

A request to the Treasury Department for clarification of some points of maritime law relating to stranded sailors reveals the precariousness of sea life: “I have the honor to inform you that on November 30^th last [1901], the Chilean steam whaler “Fearless” was blown on the rocks and wrecked at Dutch Harbor...The wreck of the vessel left the crew destitute.”

A “poor lone mother” in Ohio begs for information about her lost son: “His last letter was June 1902 and promised to be home and we received no more of since. He should have been on the General Siglin.” A hand notation on the page indicates there was no news of the boy and newspapers of the day gave the sealing schooner up for lost.

An unusual item, which may have been sent to all U.S. ports of call, is a request from the French ambassador to be on the look-out for a stolen work of art from the French town of Laguenne…”a so-called Eucharistic dove of the thirteenth century, of gilt and enameled copper, standing on an engraved copper tray hanging by four chains from a jeweled crown. The eyes of the dove are represented by gems, and the wings and tail are also set with rare stones. In the back there is a hinged opening for the introduction of the [sacramental] hosts.” An internet search easily picks up images of these religious artifacts.

It comes as little surprise that the regulation of the liquor trade commands a large share of the correspondence. Several documents relate to the request of a James Wilson to receive a permit to sell “intoxicating liquors for medicinal, mechanical and scientific purposes” at his place of business in Circle City, Alaska. The exact type of business is not specified, but it should be noted that Circle City was a distant outpost on the Yukon River populated almost exclusively by miners.

What type of medicinal liquor did Mr. Wilson propose to sell? The import permit issued at Sitka in 1896 lists the following:

200 gals whiskey

20 gals Rum

50 gals Brandy

50 gals Port wine

50 gals sherry

200 gals Claret

1 case Absinthe

1 case Chartreuse

1 case Benedictine

50 bbls Beer

5 bbls Porter

One hopes that these quantities were sufficient to last until the Klondike Stampede of 1897 turned Circle City back into a ghost town.

Others attempted less legal methods of bringing liquor to the cold country. In 1898 the Collector of Customs at St. Michael was warned by his counterpart in Sitka that “the steamship ‘Laurada’ has aboard a valuable cargo of whiskey, which it will be attempted to land unlawfully within the District of Alaska; that the bulk of the liquor is stored underneath the ship’s coal, so that great care must be taken that none of the liquor is landed over and above what appears on her manifest as ship’s stores, and in bond.”

IN THE HOLD

Digitization of a large volume is not inexpensive. We are grateful to a group of historians researching shipwrecks on the Yukon River, the S.S. Politkovsky research team, for a special donation to make this happen. PSMHS Executive Director Karen Marshall worked with the University of Washington Digital Initiatives Program to create high-quality scans of each page of the collection, including a map hand-drawn and colored by Mr. Taylor. Thanks to their efforts, Mr. Taylor’s compilation can be stored permanently within archival-quality housing while digital copies are available to view on CD-ROM.

PSMHS has over 800 cubic feet of archival materials available for scholarly and personal research, including over 60,000 maritime related photographs and negatives, including the Joe Williamson Collection, 7,000 ships’ plans, press clippings, legal and financial records of a number of maritime companies and shipbuilding firms, and detailed records of ships’ movement in and out of Puget Sound ports during the first half of the 20^th century. Our holdings relate to maritime life and commerce both in Puget Sound and up and down the Pacific Coast from Alaska to California.

If you are interested in working with our collections, please contact the PSMHS office to schedule an appointment in our research center, located in Georgetown at the MOHAI Resource Center.

-- Eleanor Boba

206.812.5464  research@pugetmaritime.org