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Overview

The US Army opened this base in 1849, an important staging area for settlers moving north from the Oregon Territory to Puget Sound. It was erected in the aftermath of the killings of missionaries Marcus and Narcissa Whitman and eleven other people at the Whitman Mission at Waiilatpu, WA, on 11/29/1847. The American Indian tribe, the Cayuse, had begun to chafe at the influx of Euro-American settlers into the region and the refusal of Hudson Bay Company traders to pay for the use of their land. In the mid-1850s, it became a US Army coordination center housing and resupplying units operating against rebellious American Indian groups throughout the Washington Territory. It was the first, permanent, US Army fortification north of the Columbia River.

Building History

The US Army obtained this land from Joseph T. Heath who operated a farm on it before his death in 03/1849. Writing for HistoryLink.org, Duane Colt Denfeld wrote of the fort: "The U.S. Army established Fort Steilacoom on August 22, 1849, to claim the land and to protect settlers. There had been an Indian attack on the Hudson’s Bay Company trading post, Fort Nisqually, in May 1849. A fort in the Puget Sound region would be a key defense in the emerging Pacific region. Available land was found at a Hudson’s Bay Company farm. Joseph T. Heath (d. 1849) had cleared 30 acres and constructed farm buildings, but then had died in March, so the land and buildings sat empty. The United States leased the 640-acre Heath land from Hudson’s Bay Company."

The army maintained the fort until 1868; the Territory of Washington purchased the fort buildings from the Army on 01/15/1870 for use as an asylum for the mentally ill. This hospital opened on 08/19/1871. The US Congress passed an act that later transferred the land on which the fort had stood to the Territory of Washington on 04/15/1874. The hospital came to be known officially as the "Western Washington Hospital for the Insane," on 02/03/1886, when Washington was still a US Territory.

Alteration

In 1857-1858, the fort's original log-frame buildings were replaced by 30 new, timber-frame structures.

Demolished; the Steilacoom Insane Asylum was razed in 1886.

PCAD id: 13602