1843 Fort Nisqually National Register of Historic Places Listing

The Hudson's Bay Company didn't build Fort Nisqually in Tacoma. They built it down in DuPont. In 1843, they relocated the fort closer to a freshwater creek, expanding from a mere fur-trading post into a massive agricultural empire called the Puget Sound Agricultural Company. Only two original structures survived. The Granary and the Factor's House. Actually, local citizens dragged these buildings fifteen miles north on flatbed trucks in the 1930s to save them from demolition. Today, they sit in Point Defiance Park. The Granary is the oldest standing wooden structure in Washington. It showcases pice-sur-pice construction, a French-Canadian style using hand-hewn douglas fir logs slid into grooved posts. No nails.

This place was the epicenter of British power in Puget Sound. The Brits traded beaver pelts here, but they also raised thousands of sheep and cows to export beef to Russian Alaska and tallow to Hawaii. It was a diverse hub. Native Nisqually, Kanakas (Hawaiians), French-Canadians, and Scots worked side-by-side. Then, American homesteaders showed up. They squatted on the company's pasture lands and drove off the sheep. By 1869, the British packed up and sold out to the United States government. So, these two surviving buildings represent more than just old wood. They are the physical remains of a global corporate monopoly that tried, and failed, to keep Washington British.