Friday Harbor is a community at the head of a protected embayment on the eastern coast of San Juan Island, the archipelago’s second-largest and most populous island. It lies about 18 miles (29 km) northeast of Victoria and 18 miles (29 km) west of Anacortes, Washington. The town is named for Joseph Poalie Friday, a Hawaiian who tended sheep for the Hudson’s Bay Company around 1861. He built a cabin overlooking the harbor that became a navigational landmark. The harbor is part of a highly crenulated coastline sculpted by unique geology and glaciation. The San Juan Islands form the western portion of a series of metamorphic nappes in the Northwest Cascades orogen—a mountain-building belt formed when a continental plate crumples. In these compressional settings, rock masses are thrust over one another along low-angle faults. This boundary between the Insular and Intermontane superterranes extends roughly 746 miles (1,200 km) from southern Southeast Alaska to northern Washington. The islands’ nappe experienced rapid thrusting and uplift between 100 and 84 million years ago. Most of eastern San Juan Island comprises the Constitution Formation, a sequence of Late Mesozoic sandstone interbedded with volcanic rock, black mudstone, ribbon chert, green tuff, and minor pillow lava. The islands lie within the northern Puget Lowland, a trough bounded by Vancouver Island to the west and the Cascade Mountains to the east. During the Pleistocene, the Cordilleran Ice Sheet advanced and retreated from western Washington at least six times, covering the Puget Lowland with its Puget Lobe. The final advance, during the Fraser Glaciation, ended about 11,000 years ago when post-glacial rebound reshaped the landscape and allowed settlement by the Coast Salish people. The islands’ rugged terrain and dynamic geological history have shaped both their natural beauty and cultural heritage. Today, Friday Harbor remains a vital center of maritime activity and serves as a gateway to the archipelago’s rich history and natural wonders.

The San Juan and Gulf Islands form part of a 400‑island archipelago in the Salish Sea between Vancouver Island and the coasts of Washington and British Columbia. They lie within the Gulf of Georgia culture area—which spans the Lower Fraser River, the Strait of Georgia, northern Puget Sound and southeastern Vancouver Island—and are traditional Coast Salish territory for the Lummi, Samish, Swinomish, Klallam, Songhees, and Saanich. In prehistoric times, inhabitants hunted land and marine mammals and fished for abundant shellfish. Shell middens on San Juan Island, rich in clams and mussels, testify to this bounty. The islands’ narrow passages funneled Pacific salmon, which returned chiefly to the Fraser River, although scarce freshwater restricted permanent settlement. European exploration began in the late 18th century. Spanish explorer Francisco de Eliza charted the islands in 1791, followed by British Captain George Vancouver in 1792 and Lieutenant Charles Wilkes in 1841. Soon after, San Juan Island and Puget Sound came under the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Fort Victoria operation. The Hudson’s Bay Company recruited many Hawaiian Islanders—Kanakas—as fishermen and sailors, since jobs were scarce in Hawaii and land ownership was barred. They served on whaling, exploration and trading ships and worked at forts in Alaska, Vancouver Island and San Juan Island, which eventually led to Joseph Friday’s posting. The 1846 Oregon Treaty set the 49th parallel as the boundary between British and American territories, but its ambiguity over the San Juan Islands sparked the Pig War. In 1859, after an American settler shot a pig belonging to the Hudson’s Bay Company, tensions escalated until arbitration in 1872 awarded the islands to the United States. Today, the forts at English Camp and American Camp on San Juan Island form the National Historical Park, and since the 1890s Friday Harbor has served as the archipelago’s commercial, social and cultural hub.

Following the peaceful settlement of the Pig War, the San Juan Islands became a separate county with Friday Harbor named its county seat. Early settlers used the Homestead Act to claim land on San Juan Island, but it took another 10 to 15 years for Friday Harbor to become a busy commercial center. Initial structures were built on pilings over water, and entrepreneurs soon erected general stores and saloons, clearing the waterfront forest. By the early 1900s, hotels and businesses lined the first block along the waterfront, opposite canneries, warehouses, a shipyard, a lumber mill, and wharves servicing steamer traffic. Farming, fishing, logging, and lime quarrying stabilized the local economy, while orchards produced apples, pears, plums, and cherries for domestic and export markets. In 1904 the Puget Sound Biological Station was established in a single cabin by two University of Washington professors. Two years later they moved operations to a cannery building, and in 1909 the station relocated to donated land. In 1917 the University Board of Regents applied to the US War Department for a land grant at Point Caution, the headland north of Friday Harbor; in 1921 President Warren G. Harding signed a House Resolution, granting 484 acres on the east side of San Juan Island for university use. Meanwhile, in 1907 the sole banking institution—the San Juan County Bank—replaced its wood-frame building with a more ornate masonry structure at the town’s busiest intersection. World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II contributed to a decline in island agriculture, leaving Friday Harbor an economic backwater. It was not until the 1970s and 1980s that new residents and businesses revived the island’s economy. Today, Friday Harbor retains much of its original character, its historic buildings and landmarks attesting to a storied past and a distinctive Puget Sound waterfront town. Read more here and here. Explore more of Friday Harbor and San Juan Island here: