Forgotten Histories and the Renewal of Skagit’s North Fork

Former artist community on the Skagit River delta has changed local culture and estuary management.

View looking up a channel on through the Skagit estuary towards Fishtown. // Leah Henry

Story by Nathaniel Lloyd

March 7, 2023

Less than a year after Richard Gilkey sent his letter to newspapers around northwest Washington in 1988, the Fishtown woods were cut, residents evicted and the shacks that once housed the artist community known as Fishtown were gone.

“The fate of eagles, herons and four-hundred-year-old trees deserves our careful study,” wrote Gilkey, former artist and resident of the Fishtown community. “I feel the Fishtown woods should be a refuge for wildlife, plants and other threatened species such as artists.”

Today, the historic site where Fishtown once thrived shows only the slightest hint of its former inhabitants. A couple of cabins poke out from the trees, extending their docks into the meandering North Fork of the Skagit River.

“Pretty much everything that was officially Fishtown at the time came down,” said Claire Swedberg, co-author of the novel “In the Valley of Mystic Light: An Oral History of the Skagit Valley Arts Scene.”

From the 1930s to the 1950s, seasonal fishermen occupied the cabins. They would pass time in the shacks, waiting for their turn to set a net across the narrowing mouth of the Skagit River. After gillnetting was restricted on the river, the fishermen left, and the shacks weathered and decayed, according to Swedberg’s novel.

In the 1960s, the shacks were repaired and became semi-permanent homes for an expanding network of young Seattle poets, sculptors and painters. Charlie Krafft, the first artist and informal mayor of Fishtown, introduced friends to the shacks on a bend on the Skagit River. 

“We came there because this was the Northwest to us,” said former Fishtown resident Steve Herold who moved in at the invitation of Krafft. “In the summertime, Fishtown is like paradise mixed with the Wizard of Oz.”

Life was slow on the river. Fishtown allowed for time to be spent communing with the flow of natural processes; the wind in the trees and the passing river. But life was not easy.

Cattails on the North Fork Skagit estuary. // Leah Henry

“We didn’t even have gas generators, we could have, we didn’t. We had candles and kerosene lamps, we had wood stoves, we cut and bucked our own wood. If you didn’t get enough in time, it was a miserable winter. We had drafty little cabins and we got hit by floods,” Herold said. “We thrived on it because we took it to heart.”

Herold said the artistic elements united the group of artists and scholars now known as the Fishtown community. 

“Fishtown represented a place for us to gather and share and do our arts. One of the things that characterizes the Fishtown people is cooperative art, it made a real dynamic thing that kinda stood out… and nature entered that very warmly,” Herold said.

The Fishtown artists drew much of their inspiration from Guy Anderson and Morris Graves who were part of the Northwest Mystics artistic movement that preceded them. Anderson and Graves both spent years living near the mouth of the Skagit River and Fishtown, inspired by Native American and Asian traditions in the region.

Despite living so close to the natural world, “we never thought of environment and environmental life there until the last few years we were there,” Herold said.

In 1988, hundreds of residents and their allies protested against the planned logging of old growth forests around Fishtown.

Conflicts between Fishtown’s landowners and the surrounding community signaled the end of Fishtown’s existence on the river. The following year, community members were evicted and their cabins demolished.

“Everything had changed. There was not a single identifiable aspect of Fishtown that was still there,” said former resident Bo Miller. “The old [saying] is Fishtown is a state of mind and you can't get there from here. Now it just flat out physically does not exist any more.” 

Today, the remnants of Fishtown reside in museums around the Northwest, in the area’s universities and in the mentality of those seeking a place to commune with nature.

“We realized that we are sitting on a gold mine of happiness, a gold mine of creativity,” Herold said. “We got our artistic inspiration and our poetic inspiration from the land around us.”

Sunset over the Skagit flats, near La Conner and the mouth of the North fork. // Leah Henry

Members of the Fishtown community remain important influences on artists of the Pacific Northwest, but the geographic location now holds a different purpose. The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife is leading restoration projects to revitalize salmon runs in the Skagit River. Two locations near the Fishtown site are likely to become project areas.

“The main goal of those projects is to make space for juvenile fish that are coming down the river and need a place to rear, but when you start changing land uses you’re impacting other people [and] interests in the delta,” said Jenny Baker, a project manager for Skagit estuary restoration at Fish and Wildlife.

The Skagit River is the third largest river on the west coast, it produces a third of the wild salmon in the Salish Sea and is the only river with every single wild salmon still spawning in its tributaries, said Brian Cladoosby, Swinomish Indian Tribal Community leader, on the “Tales of the Magic Skagit” podcast.

Since white settlers began diking the estuaries and wetlands of the Skagit River to create farmable land, 90% of crucial salmon rearing habitat was lost, according to a 2011 report. Making space for salmon in the estuary inevitably means regulating human use. 

Growing increase in demand for recreational activities results in either further human regulation or salmon habitat loss.

More people in the estuary can raise habitat concerns, said Greg Muis, Skagit Wildlife Area Manager at Fish and Wildlife. 

Natural areas like the estuary that fronted Fishtown are looking to find balance between human access and maintaining a thriving ecosystem.

Nathaniel Lloyd is a senior environmental policy student who enjoys exploring the lesser known or forgotten historical places and people that tell the stories of the Pacific Northwest.

Leah Henry is a student designing her own interdisciplinary program through the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. She enjoys using her photography to inspire wildlife conservation and environmental compassion.