Community takes its rich history very seriously

By DON CARTER
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

The first permanent white settler, Col. Isaac Ebey, staked out 640 acres of prime farmland in 1850 just south of what later became the Coupeville town site. He left his name on Ebey's Prairie, and his head and body now lie together in the small cemetery on a knoll overlooking the prairie.

When the Haida Indians from Canada attacked in 1857, they took Ebey's head home and kept it for several years.

Just two years after Ebey landed, a New England skipper claimed 320 acres for the town of Coupeville, to make it the state's second-oldest incorporated town, after Steilacoom.

Capt. Thomas Coupe, who has many descendents still living in the area, decided the site was perfect for a deep-water port. A lot of other Yankee captains agreed, and the town soon had more than a dozen captains mooring their square-riggers at Coupeville.

"Coupeville was right on what then was the equivalent of Interstate 5," said Rob Harbour, administrator of the Ebey's Landing National Historical Reserve.

In the years when almost all Puget Sound commerce traveled by water, Coupeville was the hub where passengers and freight transferred from big ocean-going vessels to the smaller ones that served dozens of communities around the Sound.

Coupeville, which remains the Island County seat, also was the political center of much of Western Washington when the county covered most of the turf between King County and the Canadian border. The mega-county started falling apart in 1860, when the presidential election put Abraham Lincoln in the White House. The 17 voters in what's now Snohomish County got sore because their ballots, for some unknown reason, never made it to Coupeville to be counted. The unhappy voters petitioned to form their own county.

Coupeville's economy, like that of Port Townsend, melted down about the turn of the century when roads and railways, and the steamship, made Seattle and Tacoma the preferred ports. Almost overnight, "the town went from being the hub to being the end of the road," Harbour said.

Since then, there hasn't been much economic pressure to tear anything down, build anything new, or expand. Fortunately, many of the historical structures were preserved.

But not without some help.

The Island County Historical Society was formed in 1949, mobilized by the county commissioners' plan to tear down the 1891-vintage county courthouse. The fight was unsuccessful, and Island County's headquarters are a non-descript 1950s-era hulk.

But the society developed some muscle. "This community really takes its history seriously," said Sandra Plush, the historical society's director.

When a developer proposed building houses on some of Ebey Prairie's prime farmland in the late 1960s, the community mobilized again. It got the federal government to step in, to create the nation's first historical reserve in 1978.

Almost all of the 17,000 acres in the reserve remain under private ownership, but the National Park Service is buying development rights to preserve farmland. The idea is to "preserve a working, cultural landscape" with economically viable farms and businesses, while protecting historical structures, said Harbour, the reserve administrator.

A few years ago, the historic Greenbank Farm a few miles south of Coupeville was threatened by similar development. This time, the community put together a consortium of the Nature Conservancy, Island County and Port of Coupeville to buy the 520-acre site.

Although plans for the farm's future are still being debated, the idea is to keep part of it as a working farm and use many of the large outbuildings for various arts and crafts enterprises -- to both create jobs and add another magnet for tourists.