The Story of the Key Peninsula Highway: Part I

For decades after it was built in the 1920s and before parts of it became State Route 302 in the 1960s and the Key Peninsula Highway in the 1980s, the county road from Longbranch to Wauna was simply the Gig Harbor-Longbranch Highway.

It had also briefly been Permanent Highway 13 until the segment that would become SR 302 was designated Secondary State Highway 14B in the 1930s.

Those names have come and gone, but are preserved in old maps, newspaper articles, and county and state archives. Those sources are layers in a palimpsest that, taken together, tell the history of the most important road on the Key Peninsula. As those layers are peeled back, they add depth and texture to the peninsula’s history since settlers arrived in the late 1800s.

The story of the Key Peninsula Highway starts in those early years, almost four decades before the new highway was built in the 1920s. And as it turns out, clues pointing to that early history exist to this very day.

It all began in the summer of 1884.

A Road Imagined

In 1884, the peninsula had a population of only a few dozen settler families, clustered around Lake Bay (the spelling used at the time), in Minter Bay, and on the hills on the west shore of Burley Lagoon. Almost all settlers were newcomers, having arrived in the late 1870s and early 1880s.

The first settlers in Lake Bay were the Crevistons and Tiedemans, followed in the early 1880s by the Lorenz and Ulsh families. Home Colony wouldn’t be established until 12 years later, in 1896.

In the summer of 1884, the Alversons, the Wrights, and a handful of other families from Tacoma became the first settlers in Vaughn Bay. Farther north, George and Lucinda Minter would soon buy 127 acres of logged land on Minter Bay after giving up on clearing a tract where they had initially settled near Horseshoe Lake.

And by 1884, on the west shore of Burley Lagoon, in today’s Wauna, William Cooil, Theodore Fuller, Walter McLeod, and William Alexander had filed some of that area’s earliest homestead claims. It was still eight years before the first bridge across the mouth of the lagoon was built in 1892.

All of which is to say that proposing a 20-mile road running the length of the isolated and sparsely populated peninsula was a forward-looking act of imagination. Any roads that existed until then were old logging roads or shorter wagon roads. A longer road serving a larger area would need to be properly surveyed, land for it acquired from private owners, and the road itself maintained over the long term.

That was a job for government.

Settlers’ Tax Dollars at Work

Washington territorial law placed counties in charge of establishing and maintaining their roads. Homeowners in a community could petition the county for a new road, following a process the law laid out. If the commissioners determined that the road proposed was of “public utility,” the petition was approved. The petition specified an initial and ending point for the road and suggested a general route. If a suitable route was found, the road was surveyed and eventually built.

The cost was paid by road taxes levied on local property owners. Adult male owners who could not pay the tax were required to contribute labor to the project.

So it was that on Aug. 8, 1884, the Pierce County commissioners approved a petition by Ira Creviston and others “praying for a county road commencing at a point on  Puget Sound … thence in a northerly direction … near Lake Bay, thence in a northerly direction to the Kitsap County line.” The proposed starting point was on the north shore of Taylor Bay; the road would end roughly where 94th Ave NW ends at the Kitsap County line today.

Two days earlier, Aug. 6, 1884, the county had approved a petition by J.B. Bingham for a road between Gig Harbor and Kitsap County, so a road to ultimately connect the Key Peninsula to Gig Harbor would be a welcome addition.

The county appointed Lakebay residents J.W.C. Ulsh and William Creviston as “viewers” to identify a suitable route, and the road was then surveyed by deputy county surveyor George L. Miller in late October. The law required viewers to be “disinterested persons” regarding the proposed road. Given that Ira Creviston was William’s 22-year-old son, the choice of the elder Creviston as a viewer is perhaps surprising, but no one in the community objected. As surveyed, the road did go through the Creviston homestead.

Deputy surveyor Miller’s field notes and survey plat have been preserved in the county archives, and they shed light on the early history of the Key Peninsula Highway. They also explain why two roads at the opposite ends of the peninsula today, Creviston Drive NW near Wauna and Creviston Road SW near Longbranch, share the same name.

It all goes back to the road that Ira Creviston and his fellow settlers proposed, and George Miller surveyed in 1884. With inevitable relocations, realignments, and other modifications, the road has defined the flow of people and goods on the Key Peninsula and facilitated its growth for almost a century and a half.

The Remains of a Road

That the 1884 road is the predecessor of today’s highway becomes strikingly clear when Miller’s survey plat is overlaid on a current map of the Key Peninsula.

On the combined map, included here, the original road as surveyed is shown in bold white. Today’s SR 302/Key Peninsula Highway is shown in red.

The similarity is striking, but two places where the two roads diverge jump out immediately.

The yellow box at the south end encloses Creviston Road SW from the north until it ends at Erickson Road SW in the south. The segment from Erickson Road to Taylor Bay that Ira Creviston requested and Miller surveyed does not appear to have been built.

Moving north, the county road turns left at today’s Cornwall Road NW, bypassing Joe’s Bay, continuing north along today’s 186th.

No county road served Joe’s Bay or Home Colony when the settlement was founded in 1896, but in October of that year, Home founder Oliver Verity and others asked the county for a road from their new community to intersect “the present county road at or near the Lake Bay school house.”

Finally, the section in the yellow box at the north end encloses today’s Creviston Drive NW.

What’s in a Name

County roads were named either after their starting and ending points or after the name of the principal petitioner. An example of the former is today’s 118th Ave NW, known as Kitsap-Minter Road after it was approved in November 1887. The county road Ira Creviston and others asked for in 1884 was at first known as Devil’s Head-Kitsap County Road, but by the early 1900s, it was already described as Ira Creviston County Road.

As the years went by and the highway was reconfigured, leading eventually to the 1920s Gig Harbor-Longbranch Highway, the segments that were bypassed at the north and south ends of Ira Creviston Road kept their original names. They are living memories from a very early era of road building on the peninsula, their undulating grades following the contours of the land, a reminder that they were built before the advent of heavy road-building and grading equipment.

As it turns out, Cornwall Road NW itself was also named Ira Creviston Road until the early 1980s, when the county’s unified coordinate grid was extended to the Key Peninsula, as will be discussed in Part II of this story.

The segments of Ira Creviston County Road completed and open to traffic in 1914 are shown on an important road map of Pierce County compiled by county engineer M. Roy Thompson. A detail from that map showing the Key Peninsula accompanies this article.

That map calls out four sections of the completed Ira Creviston County Road. Section 2, between the future Key Center and Home, would in a few years be realigned and become part of the new highway.

By 1920, the population of the peninsula had grown to over 1,000, almost 10 times its estimated size in 1884. Automobiles were slowly edging out horse-drawn buggies, and three years earlier, in 1919, car ferry service was inaugurated between Tacoma and Gig Harbor. The farmers on the Key Peninsula needed better roads, as did the tourists who, enchanted by the natural beauty of the peninsula, made it a destination for a weekend of auto touring.

By then, Washington, along with other states, had received federal funds to be apportioned to counties for road improvement.

Ira Creviston County Road would soon give way to a new arterial, with only a few of its original segments surviving undisturbed to the present.
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Correction: Regular car ferry service between Tacoma and Gig Harbor was not inaugurated until the spring of 1919. The print edition of the article had the date as 1917.