Old Man House Park

The park is a single acre of grass and beach on Agate Passage, with the bridge to Bainbridge Island in view. For most of the nineteenth century a Suquamish winter house stood along this shore: a cedar plank building put up around 1800 that ran more than six hundred feet along the water and perhaps as much as eight hundred and fifty, the largest such house known on the Northwest Coast, home to as many as six hundred people. Kitsap lived in it, and so did his relative siʔał, the leader the city of Seattle is named for. siʔał died in the house on June 7, 1866.

Four years later, in 1870, the federal Indian agent for the reservation ordered it burned. The point was to end communal living and push the Suquamish into single-family houses on separate plots, as farmers. No photograph of the building exists. Settlers called it Old Man House, a name that came from Chinook Jargon; the Suquamish name for the house itself has not been recovered.

The state bought the waterfront in 1950 and made it a state park, and in 2004 gave it back to the Suquamish Tribe. In 2009 the tribe dedicated the House of Awakened Culture on the waterfront in Suquamish, modeled on the old house, its first traditional gathering place since the burning. The Suquamish Museum, opened in 2012, tells the tribe's history, and siʔał's grave, marked by a memorial of cedar and granite, is in the cemetery near St. Peter's mission, up the hill from the park.