Eerie Remains of WWI History Are Lurking in Henderson Bay

The view across Gary Furuheim’s back patio on a bluff near the mouth of Minter Creek is breathtaking. Overlooking Henderson Bay, Furuheim can see Mount Rainier poking its head over the top of the green firs of Kopachuck State Park with very few homes in sight.

But when you look down, it’s eerie. At low tide, his community’s private beach is littered with what looks like the carcasses of large sea creatures, some with barnacle and mussel-encrusted spines 280 feet long jutting out from the sand.

In reality, these “bones” are the nearly 100-year-old steel remnants of burned World War I-era wooden ships that help tell the story of Tacoma’s shipbuilding boom during that time.

During the war, the local shipyards had contracts to build various wooden cargo ships. Even though steel ships were preferred, the reasons for wood were simple: it was cheaper than steel, and the Pacific Northwest had plenty of it.

“But that made these ships obsolete from the get-go,” said Furuheim. He is a Navy vet and former naval shipyard employee who moved to the area seven years ago and who has since become an amateur historian on the ships in his backyard.

Once the war ended, there wasn’t much need for these types of ships, so the work pretty much just stopped. Unwanted and unneeded, the surplus boats had to go somewhere, and depending on what kind they were, that’s where the stories get wonky.

Based on photos in 1926 that show both types on fire in Henderson Bay during the same time period, Furuheim and others believe the remains could be from either a group of five-masted auxiliary schooners built by the Foundation Shipbuilding Company or “Ferris” wooden freighters, built by a variety of other shipyards nearby.

Chris Erlich, an independent museum curator and former director of the Harbor History Museum in Gig Harbor, believes this argument is rooted in local lore. But after closer examination while doing research for the Tacoma Historical Society’s “Tacoma in 1918” exhibit more than six years ago, Erlich became convinced the ships at Minter Creek are the Ferris freighters. She revealed nearly a century of secrets in a well-sourced 2018 blog post on her website, www.chriserlich.com.

She thinks schooners burned near Minter Creek were part of the lumber trade that predated the war and that the five-masted schooners were actually finished and delivered to the French Navy.

This revelation means the freighters had a relatively uneventful life. After sitting unused and unfinished in Lake Union for nearly six years with others like them, Washington Tug & Barge bought about 20 of them. The company used some as barges to haul lumber, according to Erlich, while the others were floated down to Henderson Bay so the company could scrap them for their metal. The most efficient way to do that was to burn them down to the waterline.

In the Minter Creek case, the freighters were tethered together and anchored along the shoreline and lit up shortly after midnight June 11, 1926. The glow from the fire could be seen all the way to Olympia, according to a report in the Tacoma News Tribune.

Furuheim thinks the spot was chosen for the ships to be burned because it wasn’t a big fishing area or shipping lane and because not many people lived around there at the time.

Though the photos suggest a quick burn, he guesses it took months for the heat and flames to get through the thick fir wood. Some of the wood is still in good condition today. Despite exposure to weather and saltwater, “this old-growth fir has held up incredibly well.” “(Tacoma shipyards) built great ships,” Erlich said.

It’s tough to count how many freighters’ remains are still at the beach by Furuheim’s home. A few are still parallel to each other, suggesting they haven’t moved much since reaching their final resting place. Winds and waves have shifted a few others. He’s heard stories that some of the boats, perhaps the schooners or freighters, broke away during their respective burns and floated around Henderson Bay: one entered Horsehead Bay, and another made its way toward Wauna. Erlich heard stories like that, too.

Although the ships saw no action and no lives were lost, Furuheim said the remnants still give off an eerie feeling. “It’s almost ghostly being down here.” Erlich recently discovered four of those ghosts have names: the Puyallup and Chesterfield from Seaborn Shipyard, and the Elestra and Elissa from Wright Shipyard. There’s no way to determine which one is which.

But instead of veering away from the spookiness, Furuheim takes advantage of it. “I can bring my grandkids down here, throw on an eye patch, and tell them it’s my pirate ship graveyard.”

The Mallows Bay-Potomac River National Marine Sanctuary is about as close to a ship graveyard as there can be. More than 100 WWI-era wooden steamships — known as the Ghost Fleet — were scuttled there to be salvaged for their metal. Erlich said she’s heard nothing about preserving the Key Peninsula site like that, but Furuheim insists he and his neighbors are respectful of its history.

“It would no doubt have faded into memory if those remains weren’t so visible,” said Erlich.