Sandy Point & Langley

Carved by ice

At the height of the last Ice Age, the Puget Lobe of the Cordilleran ice sheet buried north Puget Sound under nearly a mile of ice. As it ground south, it gouged a deep fjord between what are now Whidbey and Camano islands. When the ice melted, the sea flooded in. The result is Saratoga Passage. It is about 600 feet deep at its southern entrance between Sandy Point and Camano Head, and only about 90 feet deep up near Crescent Harbor.

The glaciers left high banks of sand and clay along most of the shore, with gravel-and-sand beaches below and a big tidal range. Fossil mammoth tusks, teeth and bones have turned up on Whidbey, and some are on display at the South Whidbey Historical Museum in Langley.

A name with layers

In 1792 George Vancouver named this water "Port Gardner", after Vice-Admiral Sir Alan Gardner. In 1841 Charles Wilkes of the U.S. Exploring Expedition renamed it Saratoga Passage, after the flagship that won the Battle of Lake Champlain in the War of 1812. Vancouver's name moved to Everett's harbor, where it still is.

Wilkes also named Camano Island "MacDonough Island" after the Saratoga's commander. In 1847 British Admiralty charts replaced that with Camano, after the Spanish explorer Jacinto Caamaño.

Sandy Point itself had earlier names: Lushootseed č̓əč̓ɬqs, and in some early records Brown's Point.

TSEHT-skluhks, "ragged nose"

The village on the point was known as č̓əč̓ɬqs, written by historians as TSEHT-skluhks and translated as "ragged nose". Its people were the dəgʷasx̌abš, the Whidbey Island Snohomish, a band famous around Puget Sound for its wealth.

The village had a potlatch house and rich clam beds. Its festivals drew guests from as far away as the Samish people up north.

South Whidbey, from Holmes Harbor to the southern tip, was Snohomish territory. Sandy Point was one of three permanent villages there. The others were the large palisaded village Digwadsh, with six or seven longhouses, and SHET'LH-shet-lhuts ("burnt leaves") at Bush Point.

Seen from Vancouver's boats, 1792

In 1792 Joseph Whidbey, master of HMS Discovery and the man the island is named after, rowed past the point while charting the island. Vancouver's journal says about 200 people were living there.

By then smallpox had already begun to sweep the Northwest Coast. Over the 18th and 19th centuries epidemics killed roughly nine in ten people in many communities.

In 1855 the Snohomish signed the Treaty of Point Elliott at Mukilteo, and in the decades that followed they were moved to the Tulalip Reservation. The village at Sandy Point was abandoned in the late 1800s. Most Snohomish today are enrolled in the Tulalip Tribes.

Jacob Anthes, the boy who cut cordwood

In 1879, at age 14, Jacob Anthes left Gross-Gerau, Germany, to avoid compulsory military service. He worked in the Topeka stockyards, rode the new transcontinental railroad to San Francisco, and reached Seattle in 1880.

There he agreed to live on a businessman's south Whidbey homestead and "hold down" the claim. He cut cordwood for the Mosquito Fleet steamers, reportedly about 35 cords a day with hired help, and sold potatoes to loggers.

In 1889 he married Leafy Weeks of Seattle. The next year he bought land on the bluff and started planning a town.

A railroad dream and a 999-foot dock

After statehood in 1889, people were speculating wildly about where the Great Northern Railway would reach the coast. Anthes bet on south Whidbey. He brought in Seattle backers led by Judge James Weston Langley and formed the Langley Land and Improvement Company. The plat was drawn in November 1890 and recorded on April 9, 1891, with 244 lots, named after the judge.

The company built a 999-foot dock for $5,000. Then the Panic of 1893 hit, and storms destroyed the badly sited dock in 1894. Klondike gold-rush money brought the town back. In 1902 Anthes built a new dock in a sheltered cove a quarter mile east.

Hub of the island

Langley called itself "The Hub of the Island". Steamers such as the Camano ran to Everett, Seattle, Camano Island and Whatcom. Around the 1902 dock there were a shingle mill, two lumber mills and the Whidbey Island Canning Company, which shipped canned fruit and vegetables around Puget Sound. Many Langley homes took in summer boarders.

By the 1920s, two thirds to three quarters of Island County had been logged. As logging and farming faded, south Whidbey turned toward recreation, retirement and the arts.

The arts colony

In the 1930s and '40s the modernist painters Peter and Margaret Camfferman, who had both studied in Paris, ran Brackenwood, an artists' colony on the Coe property off Saratoga Road. Margaret was the niece of Helen Coe, Langley's mayor in 1920. A First Street gallery still uses the Brackenwood name.

The tradition carried on through the counter-culture arrivals of the 1960s–70s, the Choochokam street fair (1975–2015), the Whidbey Island Center for the Arts (1996), DjangoFest, and the Hedgebrook women writers' retreat.