The June 29 Gig Harbor Now and Then column introduced a photograph of Location of Mystery No. 2, which, for your convenience, is reposted below:
The clues given were that the date range is from early 1968 to April 1969, the location is somewhere on the Greater Peninsula and that one of the two buildings is still standing. The question is:
Where is Gig Harbor Now and Then Location of Mystery No. 2?
Answer: The loading dock of Stroh’s Feed and Garden Supplies, which is now the westernmost part of Wilco Farm Store, 3408 Hunt St. in Gig Harbor.
The pavement there today is not the same asphalt that Spadoni Brothers laid down over 50 years ago.
The house across Hunt Street is the building that’s no longer standing. It was built in 1914 by Civil War veteran Thad Waters from lumber milled out of logs supplied by local logger Frank Kimball.
Stroh’s building was originally further west. In the 1960s, when Highway 16 was expanded to four lanes from two, the state took the chunk of Stroh property the building was sitting on and built the northbound lanes across it. Rather than tear it down, Fred and Dorothy Stroh moved it back from the highway to where it is now.
Pictures within pictures
This is something you don’t see every day. It’s a picture of me taking a picture of the subject of a picture that includes the picture of the subject that I’m taking. Or, as I named the photo file, Picture of a Picture and a Picture Being Taken.
New business: The Bay-Island district
Any dive into Gig Harbor Peninsula history that includes the first couple decades of the 20th century will bring you face-to-face with many mentions of Bay-Island. It shows up in several forms, the most common being the Bay-Island district, the Bay-Island Producers’ Union, the steamer Bay Island, and the Bay-Island News.
There being no Bay Island in South Puget Sound, the name is a head-scratcher today. Fortunately for those of us who want to know more about such things, William Lotz of Warren explained the origin of the name in a letter to the editor of the Bay-Island News, the weekly newspaper in Gig Harbor and Key Peninsula from 1917 to 1923. The newspaper ran the letter in its Oct. 14, 1921, issue…