Puget Sound Naval Shipyard is a US Navy facility on 179 acres (72 ha) on the north shore of Sinclair Inlet at Bremerton, about 23 miles (37 km) northwest of Tacoma and 15 miles (24 km) west of Seattle, Washington. The shipyard lies on the Kitsap Peninsula in the center of the Puget Lowland, between the North Cascades to the east and the Olympic Mountains to the west and was repeatedly invaded during the Pleistocene by the Cordilleran ice sheet that covered tthe area with unconsolidated sediments as much as 3,300 feet (1,000 m) thick. The shipyard lies on glacial outwash deposits, part of the Everson Glaciomarine and Vashon Drifts, radiocarbon dated at about 14, 500 to 11,300 years old. Sinclair Inlet is a shallow embayment, no more than 66 feet (20 m) deep, that connects to Puget Sound through Rich Passage and to Dyes Inlet through the Port Washington Narrows.

The land lies within the historical territory of the Suquamish people led until 1829 by Chief Kitsap. The land was opened to non-Native settlement by the Treaty of Point Elliott in 1855. US Navy Lieutenant Charles Wilkes, who led the US Exploring Expedition, named the inlet in 1841 for George T. Sinclair, an acting master in one of his ships’ crews. Wilkes had named a nearby peninsula Point Turner, and in 1888 a Navy commission judged it the best site in the Pacific Northwest for a shipyard. Recognizing the jobs such a facility would bring, Seattle entrepreneur William Bremer and his partner and brother-in-law, Henry Hensel, bought undeveloped land near the point. In 1891, Navy Lieutenant Ambrose Barkley Wyckoff acquired about 190 acres (77 ha) of waterfront on Sinclair Inlet from a group of landowners that included Bremer. The parcel formed the core of what was then the Puget Sound Naval Station. The station was renamed Navy Yard Puget Sound in 1901, and the town of Bremerton grew alongside it.

During World War I, the yard built twenty-five submarine chasers, seven submarines, two minesweepers, seven tugboats and two ammunition ships, along with 1,700 small boats. Its main task in World War II was repairing battle-damaged ships of the Pacific Fleet, and it also modernized aircraft carriers by adding angled flight decks for jet aircraft. The yard was renamed Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in 1945. During the 1950s the shipyard entered into a new era of construction building two guided missile frigates. In 1961 it was designated a submarine repair facility, and in 1965 the USS Sculpin became the first nuclear-powered submarine it maintained. In 1990 the Navy authorized a program to recycle nuclear-powered ships there. In 2003 the shipyard consolidated with the Naval Intermediate Maintenance Facility to form Puget Sound Naval Shipyard and Intermediate Maintenance Facility. Today it is an active public shipyard and the Pacific Northwest’s largest naval shore facility, employing about 15,000 people. In 2026, a major expansion of the shipyard was announced with construction to begin in 2028. Read more here and here. Explore more of Puget Sound Naval Shipyard and Sinclair Inlet here: