Ebey's Landing National Historical Reserve The Land, The People, The Place: An Introduction to the Inventory

THE PLACE

. . . I realize that I bring myself back and back to this bluff because here scenes still fit onto each other despite their distances of time. Becoming rarer in the West, constancy of this sort. What I am looking out over in this fresh dawn is little enough changed from the past that Swan in a Makah canoe, coming or going on the Port Townsend Neah Bay route, can be readily imagined across there, the sailing gulls slide through his line of sight as they do mine. Resonance of this rare sort, the reliable echo from the eye inward, I think we had better learn to prize like breath."

Ivan Doig, Winter Brothers, 1980
Overlooking Ebey's Landing

Every landscape is historic in a certain sense. This is true of both natural and man-made environments. In natural landscapes, patterns of succession define not only the physical patterns of vegetation and other life systems, but to the trained observer, tell the ecological history of a particular parcel of land.

The same is basically true of a cultural landscape like Ebey's Landing National Historical Reserve. Successive generations shaped and reshaped the same land, slowly shifting its physical character. Old places are continually put to new uses or abandoned altogether. Over time, what remains may be no more than fragments or suggestions of a way of life and kind of living with the land. Sometimes a few important pieces of the past are easily recognized and maintained, like artifacts in a museum; dramatic reminders of a past culture. In other cases, many of the suggestions of the past are neither as obvious nor as easily protected. They are so closely laced into the present landscape fabric that their meaning and value is in the whole feeling of the place. Such is the case in Ebey's Landing. The structures, fences, gardens, and fields; the smell of cut hay or the cry of gulls; the foggy cliffs or the village seaport, all call to mind a familiar feeling and connection to the spirit of the place both past and present. The generations of people who lived on the land seem to have recognized the important pieces of this landscape without isolating them. These pieces, all part of the complete mosaic, formed a part of their everyday living. That is perhaps the essence and significance of this national reserve; it is a blending of land, people and time that together weave a sense of place and community.

This report, together with the building and landscape inventory cards that make up Volume II, is an attempt to document this sense of place, this collection of building and landscape pieces that together maintain a sense of integrity, a complete mosaic of past and present. The future of Ebey's Landing National Historical Reserve is purposefully left unaddressed. Whether or not the future of the reserve will continue to maintain the sense of place established and maintained by past generations will be the decision of those who now live -- or will in the future live-- on these lands. This is as it has always been, It is a part of the long and remarkable continuity of human interaction with the land that creates this very special place.