Coming Soon: Brief Histories of the Communities & People of Kitsap County.
We will be adding basic histories for the various communities of Kitsap County in this space soon, from Port Gamble to Gig Harbor, from Seabeck to Olalla, and every place in-between. These summaries will be taken from our the well-known volume, Kitsap County: A History, as well as submissions from other groups dedicated to the same purpose.

As our mission statement indicates, the Kitsap County Historical Society is dedicated to researching, documenting and publishing the records of the people and places of the region.

We gladly accept the role of caretakers of the past!

It is amazing how much information is available through family records and scrapbooks. Even anecdotal information is extremely valuable. We encourage all interested individuals to gather and document potential histories and make it available to us.

Artifacts are also of interest, and we have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars building a wonderful museum in Bremerton with slice-of-life displays featuring this material evidence of the past from a wide variety of sources -- schools, businesses, governments, and the ships of Puget Sound. While we have many on display, several times as many are stores in the museum's archives.

 

 

   Of all the services the Kitsap County Historical Society provides, there is none more significant than the publication of our "Big Brown History Book," aka Kitsap County: A History. This large and extremely complete volume is a wonderful collection of letters, papers, photos and documents tracing the peninsula's past back hundreds of years, recounting the days when the economy was based almost entirely on the lumber community and the thousands of small steamers that supported the mills. That volume is now undergoing an update and will be reprinted in early 2009. Details about the book and how to purchase it are noted elsewhere on this website.

We have included links to other museums, academic, genealogical, and local historical groups from the region on this site.

Much of what we will post here will be drawn from the "Big Brown History Book" but we also invite other historical groups to draft summaries of their local towns.

Check back here as we continue this project.