Port Townsend Historic District

The railroad money came and went in a single decade. Port Townsend's downtown building boom peaked in the late 1880s on the strength of a proposed rail link to Portland; by 1890 the venture had gone bankrupt, and the town never recovered its momentum. What that collapse left behind was roughly 700 residences and 60 commercial and civic buildings — brick storefronts, Queen Anne frame houses, the Jefferson County Courthouse — largely untouched because there was never enough economy to justify tearing them down. The National Park Service recognized the result in 1977 as a National Historic Landmark: one of the finest surviving examples of a late 19th-century port town on the West Coast.