Burrows Island Marine State Park History

Burrows Island Marine State Park preserves the majority of a wild-wooded island just offshore of Anacortes. Its forested summit rises nearly 650 feet above the churning waters that surround the island. The bedrock that makes up Burrows Island is part of a larger assemblage of rocks that outcrop on nearby islands and collectively make up an ophiolite sequence, a distinctive formation of rocks formed where the sea floor has spread apart at a tectonic plate boundary.

Indigenous Lands

The island lies within the traditional territories of Coast Salish Indigenous people whose present-day descendants include members of the Samish Indian Nation, Swinomish Indian Tribal Community, Suquamish Tribe, Lummi Nation, and First Nations in present-day Canada. For millennia the waters surrounding Burrows Island have provided habitat for a diverse community of life that forms the basis of their cultures.

The present-day name for Burrows Island was coined by the American explorer and naval officer Commander Charles Wilkes during the United States Exploring Expedition in 1841. He named the island for William Ward Burrows, commander of the USS Enterprise in the battle to capture HMS Boxer off the coast of Maine on September 5, 1813. That engagement was widely celebrated as a highlight of the United States’ challenge to British naval power during the War of 1812. Burrows famously told the sailors under his command that “We are going to fight both ends and both sides of this ship as long as the ends and sides hold together.” Both Burrows and British Commander Samuel Blyth were mortally wounded in the battle. Interestingly, their bodies were interred next to each other in a cemetery in Portland, ME.

Local tribes ceded ownership of the area under duress to the US federal government in the Treaty of Point Elliot in 1855, keeping rights to harvest natural resources in their usual and accustomed places, including the waters surrounding Burrows Island.

Land Disposal  

After an official government survey of the island was completed in 1872, allowing the sale of the land, three individuals purchased portions of the island as a direct sale from the public domain, or Cash Entry Patent. Allen J. Miller (1872), Peter E. Nelson (1889), and John R. Ross (1891) utilized their parcels for logging and sheep farming, but it is unclear if any of them established a permanent residence on the island.

Young Island, a smaller island included within the boundary of today’s Burrows Island Marine State Park, was purchased as a Cash Entry Patent in 1890 by Edward L. Shannon, part of hundreds of acres in the area that were purchased by Shannon and his business partner Hazard Stevens (the son of Washington’s first Territorial Governor, Isaac I. Stevens).

The two men were typical of a class of wealthy American men who benefitted from the generous federal land disposal laws that transferred the lands taken from Indigenous families to American colonizers. The process often generated even greater generational wealth for those whose investments benefitted from the development of resource extraction industries and railroads as Washington quickly increased in population after the US Civil War era.

Dreams of Post-Civil War Prosperity

Hazard Stevens had served alongside his father in the US Civil War, achieving the rank of Brevet Brigadier General of Volunteers. The elder Stevens reported that his son was “very expert both at battalion and brigade drill, and he can drill a brigade much better that any of my colonels…He is making a very superior officer, indeed.” Hazard was wounded in the Battle of Chantilly on September 1, 1862, just as his father was killed while valiantly leading the regiment. After recovering from his wounds, Hazard returned to duty for the duration of the war and was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his leadership in the capture of Fort Huger near Richmond in 1863. After the war, Stevens returned to Washington Territory, became one of the first two people to document a climb to the summit of Mount Rainier in 1870, and was employed by the Northern Pacific (NP) Railroad.

He leveraged information he gained from his employment to purchase or claim more than 1,500 acres of public domain lands in Washington, many advantageously located in areas that could appreciate dramatically as the rail network expanded throughout the territory.

Stevens received a Homestead Act patent for all of Allan Island (immediately south of Burrows Island) in 1875 and purchased most of the land that makes up today’s Skyline neighborhood east of Burrows Island in 1874.

Shannon received a Homestead Act patent for adjoining acreage that also included waterfront on Ship Harbor, the location of today’s Washington State Ferries Anacortes Terminal. Both men expected their properties to support developments associated with railroad and port development.

Both Stevens and Shannon eventually sold most of their land to Amos Bowman, who built a sawmill and promoted the development of the City of Anacortes, named for his wife, Anna Curtis Bowman. The city eventually burgeoned when an NP branch line was completed in 1890.

Burrows Island Lighthouse

With the completion of rail lines, increased shipping from Anacortes and Bellingham passed through the hazardous waters of Rosario Strait, between Burrows Island and Lopez Island to the west. In 1897, the US Lighthouse Board requested that a light station be constructed on the western tip of Burrows Island to aid in navigation through the waterway.

Funding for the Burrows Island Light Station was approved on February 24, 1903, and nearly 50 acres of the former Allen Miller Cash Entry Patent were purchased by the government to support the facility. Architect Carl Leick was engaged to design the lighthouse, keepers’ quarters and fog signal building. Leick’s design motto was “Build ‘em stout, and make ‘em last.” Construction bids were opened on May 10, 1905, and the lighthouse, with a 34-foot tower containing a fourth-order Fresnel lens, was completed and lit on April 1, 1906.

The light station was staffed until 1972, when it was automated. One of the keeper’s quarters was demolished in the early 1990s and replaced with a helicopter landing pad.

The National Historic Lighthouse Preservation Act of 2000 initiated a process for making unused lighthouses available at no cost to eligible agencies or organizations for educational, cultural, historic preservation or park and recreation uses. Burrows Island Light Station was made available in 2006.

On June 10, 2010, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar endorsed the transfer of the Burrows Island Light Station to the non-profit Northwest Schooner Society (NWSS). After the Coast Guard removed asbestos, lead, and contaminated soil from the property, it was transferred to NWSS for restoration, an ongoing process.

Becoming a State Park

The Washington State Parks and Recreation Commission (WSPRC) acquired over 40 acres of the Burrows Island Light Station property from the federal government in 1978, under terms of the Federal Lands to Parks program. Additional land on Burrows Island, and tidelands adjacent to Alice Bight on the northeastern part of the island, were acquired by WSPRC with grant funding in 1990, 1992, 1993, and 2003, bringing more than 85% of the island under WSPRC ownership.

The 2003 acquisition of 52 acres on the northwest portion of the island was facilitated by The Nature Conservancy, a non-profit land protection organization. The property was gifted to the University of Washington by Frank Doleshy, a rhododendron horticulturist and mountaineer, in 1995. The Nature Conservancy purchased the property from the University of Washington in 1999 to hold until funding was obtained for purchase by the WSPRC.

All of neighboring Young Island, rich with pocket beaches and potential diving areas, was purchased by the WSPRC in 2015 with the assistance of the Trust for Public Land, a private land trust with a mission to work with public agencies to create, protect and steward nature-rich places that are vital to human well-being.

Cascadia Marine Trail

In the mid-1950s, a veteran of the World War II 10th Mountain Division, Tom Steinburn, one of the first mountaineers to reach the summit of Alaska’s Denali, joined with Washington mountaineer/geologist Wolf Bauer to begin exploring the reaches of Washington’s Puget Sound and Salish Sea by kayak. He noted that when traveling by kayak “your equipment carries you instead of you carrying your equipment.”

He would go on to help found the Washington Water Trails Association and advocate for the 1993 establishment of the Cascadia Marine Trail, a 150-mile route on the waters of Washington’s Salish Sea honoring the water transportation utilized by the region’s Indigenous people for thousands of years. At the June 26, 1999 event recognizing the Cascadia Marine Trail as one of 17 National Millenium Trails, First Lady Hillary Clinton said that the trails “tell the story of our nation's past and will help to create a positive vision for our future.”

Burrows Island Marine State Park hosts a primitive campsite designated solely for use of human-powered boaters as part of the Cascadia Marine Trail at Alice Bight, on the northeastern part of the island.

From the quiet campsite, the view extends from Young Island to today’s Skyline neighborhood in Anacortes.