Jones Island Marine State Park History

“Islands are still the domain of the explorers, the adventurers, the discoverers.”  --Alexander L. Bond, conservation biologist

Jones Island Marine State Park, an entire island off the southwest corner of Orcas Island in the San Juan Archipelago, offers each visitor a chance to connect with their inner adventurer. Its hills rise nearly 200 feet above a low isthmus. Rock outcrops on its rugged shore reveal that the bedrock of the island was formed deep on the ocean floor and uplifted above the water’s surface by the forces of plate tectonics.

During the most recent ice age, nearly one-mile-thick glacial ice covered the San Juan Archipelago. The glacier ice shaped the landscape by scouring softer rocks to create deeper straits and channels, and smoothed and rounded areas of harder bedrock such as Jones Island’s hills. Because soils were stripped by the ice flow and later meltwaters, sections of the island’s hills have developed into grassy “balds” with sparse vegetation.

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, Lummi Nation, Suquamish Tribe, and First Nations in present-day Canada.

For thousands of years, the lands and waters of the San Juan Archipelago have provided habitat for a diverse community of life that forms the basis of their cultures. As winter days lengthen into spring, herring and herring roe collect in the eelgrass beds near shore. A little later, spring Chinook salmon pass through the island channels.

The waters around Jones Island were especially significant locations for the placement of reef nets. Reef nets were devised thousands of years ago by Coast Salish fishers as a means to harvest summertime runs of sockeye salmon returning through the San Juan Archipelago to their spawning grounds in the Fraser River watershed. The reef net gear consists of a pair of canoes with bag-like nets suspended between the two vessels, facing into the saltwater current at a site where rocky “reefs” forced fish to swim into the nets. Traditional willow-bark nets were anchored in place with 200-400-pound stones. Reef-net sites were owned by individuals and ownership was commonly passed down by inheritance.

US Ex. Ex.

The US Congress authorized an exploring and surveying expedition by US military personnel to map and gather scientific information about the Antarctic and Australian continents, the Pacific Ocean and the Pacific Northwest in 1836, the first such project by the US government. The US Exploring Expedition (or US Ex. Ex.) set sail from Hampton Roads, Virginia on August 18, 1838, and explored much of today’s state of Washington, by sea and overland to the area of today’s eastern Washington, during the summer of 1841, before returning to New York by completing a circumnavigation of the globe on June 10, 1842.

The present-day name for Jones Island was coined by the expedition’s Commander Charles Wilkes. The island was named for Captain Jacob Jones, a US naval officer who captured the storm-damaged HMS Frolic from the British Navy during the War of 1812. Wilkes’ attempt to rename features of the San Juans for notable American naval personnel and vessels extended to other geographic points in the archipelago, but many of his selections were not ultimately retained on the official charts. Instead, previous nomenclature assigned by Spanish navigators and British Captain George Vancouver was placed on official US maps and nautical charts. Long-used Indigenous names, which typically incorporate geographic knowledge or recognizable descriptions of topography, were seldom perpetuated in the San Juans.

The Pig War

Dual claims to the Pacific Northwest region by the US and Britain were negotiated in 1846, setting the land boundary at 49° north latitude, but the status of the San Juan Archipelago remained disputed, as British and American authorities disagreed over the placement of the maritime border between Vancouver Island and the mainland.

On June 15, 1859, Lyman Cutlar, an American farmer claiming land on San Juan Island under terms of the Donation Land Claim Act, shot a pig owned by an employee of the British Hudson’s Bay Company. Cutlar’s offer of restitution was spurned and British authorities threatened to arrest Cutlar. American settlers asked for US military protection. Captain George Pickett (of later infamy for his role as a Confederate officer) and 66 soldiers of the 9th Infantry Regiment responded from Fort Bellingham, establishing a camp at the south end of the island. Additional US troops were transferred from Fort Townsend.

The British sent three ships under the command of Captain Geoffrey Hornby in response, building fortifications on the north end of the island with orders from James Douglas, the governor of the Vancouver Island colony, to remove the Americans from the island. Hornby refused the order, waiting for instructions from Rear Admiral Robert Baynes. Baynes countermanded the order, saying he would not escalate the conflict into war “over a squabble about a pig.”

US negotiators likewise desired to de-escalate the situation, as their focus shifted to the early stages of the US Civil War. Negotiations resulted in a joint occupancy agreement, with forces reduced to no more than 100 personnel, who enjoyed amicable social relations for the duration of the occupation.

In 1871, the Treaty of Washington between the US and Great Britain mandated the submission of the competing claims for adjudication by a commission appointed by German Kaiser Wilhelm I. On October 21, 1872, the commission decided in favor of the American claim. The British Royal Marines withdrew on November 25, 1872, and the American troops had all returned to Fort Townsend by July 1874.

Land Disposal

Local tribes had ceded ownership of the area to the US federal government under duress in the Treaty of Point Elliot in 1855, in spite of the fact that colonial administration of the San Juan Archipelago was not yet settled. In the treaty, Indigenous residents kept rights to harvest natural resources in their usual and accustomed places throughout the islands, especially at reef net sites owned by tribal members. Many continued to live in their homes as their ancestors had for thousands of years rather than relocate to reservations as stipulated in the treaty.

Nellie Smenanock Kittles, a member of the Lummi Nation, lived on Jones Island with her husband Allen. They built a small farm and fruit orchard, and their son Robert, who worked with a local steamship company, continued to live on the island until his death in 1897. The Kittles family was never granted legal ownership of the property, however.

Making a Park

Portions of Jones Island were reserved for lighthouse purposes in 1875, but no lighthouse was ever built. On September 4, 1935, the State Parks Board voted to accept a license for use of the island for park purposes from the US Lighthouse Service, pending transfer of title to the state. Instead, on March 30, 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared Jones Island a Migratory Bird Refuge with Executive Order 7594, “in order to effectuate further the purposes of the Migratory Bird Conservation Act.” The order also revoked most of the earlier lighthouse reservation, retaining small parcels on the northwest and south points of the island.

Proclamation 2416 in 1940 changed the name of the protected area to Jones Island National Wildlife Refuge. The US Fish and Wildlife Service authorized a fox farm operation on the island until 1959, when the agency entered into an agreement with the Washington State Parks and Recreation Commission (WSPRC) to develop and operate recreation facilities on the island and eliminated the remaining Lighthouse Reservations.

On October 15, 1982, US President Ronald Reagan approved Public Law 97-333 authorizing the transfer of “all ownership, jurisdiction, and control over the Jones Island National Wildlife Refuge… to the State of Washington for use as a public recreation area.” The transfer was completed on December 22, 1982.

In December 1990, a major windstorm toppled hundreds of trees on Jones Island, including some more than 400 years old. Park managers initially favored a timber sale to remove the downed trees, which would have required dragging logs across areas with sensitive plants and forming log rafts in fragile eelgrass beds along the shore. Responses from community members at public hearings encouraged park staff to select an alternative with minimum impact to natural and cultural resources, recognizing the “blow-down” as a special eco-type of natural forest succession.

To reduce the fire hazard, fine fuels (branches and twigs less than three inches in diameter) were cut and removed or left to decompose on damp ground. Large, stable logs were left as they were, except where necessary to restore campsites and trails.

Most of the work was completed by the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community forestry crew, and the park reopened to the public in the summer of 1992. The successful project has served as a model for management decisions in response to similar catastrophic events in other state parks.

On September 5, 1997, the WSPRC approved the designation of nearly 157 acres of Jones Island Marine State Park as a Natural Forest Area, defined as an area with a principal function of “maintaining the state’s biodiversity while expanding human understanding and appreciation of natural values.”