English Camp

The Royal Marines came ashore on Garrison Bay on March 23, 1860, to hold the British end of San Juan Island while London and Washington argued over the boundary. The navy surveyors who chose the spot remembered it from an earlier survey, when one of their officers had noted abandoned plank houses standing among a vast shell midden on the shore. The bay had been a Coast Salish winter village for centuries. The marines cleared the trees, and the parade ground they laid out sits on that midden, which they described as shell banked ten feet high and a hundred and twenty yards long.

Where the Americans at the other end of the island built for use, the British built to remind themselves of home. The second commander, Captain Delacombe, had a formal flower garden laid out at the foot of the hill below the officers' quarters, and the camp grew to more than two dozen buildings, with a hospital, a commissary and a small blockhouse on the water's edge. Relations with the American garrison were friendly from the start, and for twelve years the two camps shared the island without a shot fired.

The marines left in November 1872. An American survey that winter called the blockhouse old and worthless, but the Crook family, who farmed the site for nearly a century, kept it standing, and for years the British government paid them to tend the marines' cemetery on Young Hill. The barracks, commissary, blockhouse and garden have been restored, and a steep trail climbs to the cemetery and on to views across Haro Strait to Vancouver Island.