Three great forts; Worden, Flagler, and Casey, are located here, forming the chief defense to Puget sound.  Fort Worden joins the city limits.  The present garrison force is 2,000.  The scenery from the city is grand and beyond compare.

Its business interests are varied and extensive.  Two canneries for salmon and sardines are here located, boiler works, a machine shop for building electric and gasoline engines, a shipyard, sash and door factory, lumber mills, and shingle mills, a by-product plant producing wood alcohol, turpentine, etc.

The city is substantially built and its homes are artistically created.

The harbor has twenty-five miles of waterfront and fine anchorage of from nine to eighteen fathoms, and is an ideal refuge for all seagoing craft.

The city has gas and electric lights, paid fire department, fine churches, splendid schools, and a magnificent gravity water system furnishes the town of Irondale, Hadlock and Forts Worden and Flagler, having plenty of water to spare for thousands mote.

Irondale is practically a suburb of Port Townsend, having the only pig iron plant in the state.  It is an extensive and growing concern, using bog iron from the vicinity and other ores from different sources.

Port Ludlow, Duckabush, Bogachiel, port Discovery, Quilcene, and Chimacum are small villages scattered about the county and are centers of agricultural activity.

KING COUNTY

King county is distinguished by having Seattle for its county seat.  The county is an empire in itself, stretching from the shores of Puget sound to the peaks of the Cascade mountains, and containing more than 2,000 square miles of territory.  It also includes Vashon, one of the large islands of the sound.

Resources.

King county’s sources of revenue are varied and extensive.  Its lumber industry, growing out of the vast forests within its borders not only, but from the cutting of logs brought in from other sections of the state, is immense.

Its agricultural lands are not surpassed in fertility by any, and include not only the alluvial deposits in its river bottoms, but great areas of shot clay and other soils splendidly adapted to fruit culture.

Its mining industries include not only very great acreage of coal measures, which have been producing coal for commercial purposes for local and foreign trade for thirty years and are scarcely scratched as yet, but also fissure veins of the precious metals—­gold, silver, lead, [Page 63] copper, antimony, arsenic, and also iron, asbestos, fire clays, kaolin, granite, sandstones, lime ledges, and others.

Its fishing industries in its own waters and from the ocean give employment to a large number of men and its fish are shipped even as far east as Boston, Massachusetts.