Fort Ward Community Hall – a history

Restoring the Fort Ward bakery

So, this is the story. It really starts a more than a century ago with big guns and exploding mines, and moves on to secret codes and Pearl Harbor. It’s the story of a little brick bakery at a sleepy fort on Puget Sound that had a front-row seat to history – and then came to play a role of its own. And it’s the story of a neighborhood that came together to save the building for a new era of community use, and the amazing discoveries we made along the way

It’s the story of what has proved to be, we believe, a unique and truly grassroots preservation effort: restoration of the historic, 1910 bakery building at Fort Ward on Bainbridge Island.

The Little Fort at Bean Point

Fort Ward was established in 1903 at the south end of Bainbridge Island, part of the Puget Sound’s coast defense network against the threat of attack or blockade by foreign navies.

A wave of permanent construction in 1910 brought a majestic administration building and a 109-man barracks, a gymnasium and post exchange, a guardhouse, a giant quartermaster warehouse, duplexes for officers and NCOs, and for good measure, a bakery.

While overshadowed somewhat by its larger sister forts farther north – Worden, Casey and Flagler, the so-called “Triangle of Fire” – Fort Ward nonetheless was an important link in Puget Sound’s defense. A hilltop battery of three 8-inch guns commanded the waters south of the island, and smaller batteries and a submarine minefield in Rich Passage made the fort the last line of defense for the newly opened Puget Sound Naval Yard, just around the corner in Bremerton.

The big guns were occasionally practice fired and the submarine mines detonated to roars and cascades of spray, but for twenty years, the fort and its Army Coast Artillery Corps garrison stood sentinel for an attack that never came. The big guns were eventually removed and the fort put on caretaker status in 1928, but the story was really just beginning.

A decade later, with rumblings of war in the Pacific, Fort Ward was reopened in 1938 – this time by the Navy, as Naval Radio Station Bainbridge Island. Ostensibly a radio school to train young enlistees in the art of Morse code and communications, the fort’s real purpose was as top-secret “Station S,” a clandestine listening post perfectly sited to intercept Imperial Japanese military and diplomatic radio traffic in the Pacific.

The fort’s old buildings were repurposed; the guardhouse became a radio school, the old gymanisum and post exchange became the radio intercept center, and so on. Because the hundreds of tube radios at Station S drew massive power, the bakery became a power station, from within which a giant diesel generator sent high-voltage current around the base.

This time, Fort Ward made history. In December 1941, on the eve of Pearl Harbor, Tokyo’s famous “14-part message” was plucked out of the air by Station S en route to the Japanese consul in Washington DC and whisked to the War Department for decoding – an intelligence coup that presaged, although couldn’t prevent, the attack on Hawaii.

All true! And chronicled from the very first page of “The Codebreakers” by David Kahn, a definitive work on the history of cryptography. So we can fairly surmise that the radios that intercepted and relayed these and countless other secret messages throughout the war were powered by the generators in the former bakery.

Code training continued into the early Cold War, and the Army returned for a time to service Nike missiles for Bainbridge Island’s new defense installations (at today’s Eagledale and Strawberry Hill parks).

Fort Ward was decommissioned for the second and final time in 1958. The waterfront areas became Fort Ward State Park, while the uplands were parceled off into private lots and the old buildings sold off as eccentric fixer-uppers. The Fort Ward bakery became a private home, and so it remained for the next 50 years.

The Fort Ward bakery in 1919; in 1948 as the Naval Radio Station Bainbridge Island power station (note new room added to north end of building); in 1960 after the fort was decommissioned (note windows bricked over during Navy era, but original front doors and fanlight window intact.) The sign on the door cautions “High Voltage.” Also: Inside the Fort Ward bakery ca. 1916. Note the industrial-size baking oven and enough bread to feed the post garrison. The baker is believed to be Cpl. Horace Hawkins, listed as Post Baker on the 1916 Fort Ward company roster.

A neighborhood of preservationists

Fort Ward was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1976, thanks to the efforts of then Washington State Historic Preservation Officer David M. Hansen. The bakery was listed as a contributing element.

As residential development and infill finally began to catch up with the fort properties in the 1990s, neighborhood preservationists set two significant goals: saving the historic parade ground as a public green, and establishing a community space in one of the old buildings.

The first goal was achieved in 2002. Working with several local agencies, neighbors created the 3-acre Parade Ground park. In August of that year, a dozen or so radiomen who served here during the war returned, some for the first time since the 1940s, for the park dedication. In a ceremony with then-Congressman Jay Inslee and the Navy band, the neighborhood honored these veterans and their families for their wartime service.

That left the second goal: restoring one of Fort Ward’s historic buildings for an indoor community space. Various ideas came and went, but in 2007 the old bakery came on the market and was purchased by Kitsap County (Fort Ward) Sewer District No. 7, a tiny neighborhood utility, to create a community hall. More years passed, but in 2014 we began to organize, and neighborhood meetings showed overwhelming support for the project.

Our real inspiration was forming what came to be known as the Fort Ward Youth Committee, four high school sophomores who’d grown up within a block of the building and who, for the next two years, would be our project ambassadors. Working with the Bainbridge Island Historical Society, “the kids” got the bakery added to the City of Bainbridge Island’s local historic register. Going door to door over Christmas break 2014, they secured $10,000 in private pledges toward a restoration. Their spirited presentation to the local Rotary Club helped secure a foundational Huney Fund grant. For their efforts, they earned the City of Bainbridge Island’s 2015 Blakely Award for Leadership in Historic Preservation.

Of course, the grownups would have to play a part too (somebody had to write the grants). In July 2015, Friends of Fort Ward formed to be the official fundraising agent. We soon secured a prestigious Sivinski grant from the Washington Trust for Historic Preservation (instant catchet) and then bigger dollars from the Washington State Historical Society’s Heritage Capital Projects Fund grant program. The bakery project ranked No. 6 out of 35 projects in competitive scoring (proof of concept).

The Bainbridge Island Metro Park & Recreation District signed on to renovate the building, to run as a community hall like those at Seabold, Island Center and Yeomalt.

The team was complete, we had some funds in the bank, and the bakery restoration was underway.

Almost.

It’s got good bones! Significant architectural features from the Georgian Colonial Revival period include the rooftop cupola, areched windows and ornate masonry, sandstone sills, and scrolled soffits. Also: The bakery’s original 1908 plan, kept at the Quartermaster Corps archives at College Park, Maryland.

Not ‘unique’ by strict definition – but pretty close

For a remote outpost, Fort Ward was surprisingly well documented in both photographs and the Seattle press. In our research we unearthed photos of the bakery ca. 1910 and 1919, several from the 1940s, and post-military images from the 1960s and 1970s. Between these and the 1908 blueprints from the National Archives (passed along by the Coast Defense Study Group), we had a pretty good idea what we wanted to achieve.

The Fort Ward bakery was built to Army Quartermaster Plan No. 217, a modest 1,800 square feet in size but remarkably stately in design, representative of the Georgian Colonial Revival school then current in American military architecture. Signature features include the crowning cupola, arched masonry windows and ornate brickwork, hewn sandstone window sills and scrolled soffits in the eaves.

While thousands of buildings went up at the more than thirty coast defense forts built at the turn of the last century, only three other bakeries were apparently built to this specific plan. One, at Fort Stevens, Ore., exists today only as a concrete foundation. Another, at Fort Caswell, N.C. (now a conference center), had been badly compromised by modifications; the distinctive cupola is gone, and the brick exterior has been painted white with blue trim. The last, at Fort DuPont, Delaware, we found still extant but basically abandoned, suffering from years of neglect and decay.

So we would be setting a precedent of sorts – our bakery wasn’t quite unique, but its restoration certainly would be. While the building was structurally sound, we would have to undo and remedy significant changes made over the years, first by the Navy in the 1940s and then by private owners from the 1960s forward, meanwhile modernizing its systems for contemporary community use.

Those issues we’d have to fix … where to begin?

The Navy had for some reason bricked over many of the arched windows, only a few of which had been reopened over the years and those only partially. Two of the hewn sandstone sills on the north face had been smashed away, irreparably damaged. Two rude covered porches – one completely obscuring the once-grand front entranceway – had been grafted on and would have to be torn down.

Inside, homeowners in the 1960s had installed a raised floor some 3 feet above the slab foundation, to create a crawl space for ducted heating and piping. Partition walls carved up the main room. Two of the three original arched interior doorways leading to the south wing were bricked over. All of that would have to be demolished.

In the attic, several of the massive, century-old fir joists had cracked under the weight of the slate roof and would have to be replaced. The slate roof itself had been leaking for years, and the building was dank and reeked of must.

Most egregiously, the towering front double-doors were long gone, taken out when the floor was raised and the porch enclosed so that the doors no longer fit. Lost too were the fanlight windows, so splendid in all the old photographs. We didn’t even have a plan for replacing these.

Only the proud cupola still suggested the grandeur of the architect’s vision.

Still, as they say, it had good bones. And while we didn’t think in these terms from the outset, we’d be stripping the building back to its shell – gutting everything below the rafters – and constructing a new and modern building inside, one we hoped would recall the bakery’s period of significance, its 1910 look and feel.

When we set out to restore the bakery, we had a lot of issues to correct. To name a few: tumbledown porches grafted onto the front and back of the building, windows bricked over by the Navy in the 1940s, partition walls that carved up the interior space. Anything that wasn’t original, we peeled away. Basically, we gutted the building of everything but the rafters and brick shell.

The restoration begins … and goes on … and on…

Remember above, we said “almost.” It took another two years to get the project through a labyrinthine permitting process. Welcome to Bainbridge Island.

Restoration finally began in late 2018 with demolition of the add-on porches and carport, and would run on through the next year and beyond. We’d like to say this was an orderly process, rolling out step by step according to a fixed timeline. But work went in fits and starts as resources allowed, fundraising continuing all the while for what turned into a 20-month build.

Restoration masons spent months of painstaking work with the hammer, chisel and trowel, restoring the bricked-up windows to their original dimensions, reconditioning old bricks for reuse, rebuilding an outside wall where the Navy had punched a door through, patching holes and voids, and doing restorative piece work inside.

When we finally tore out the raised floor, we discovered that the big Navy-era diesel generator had been mounted atop a massive raised concrete slab that ran nearly the width of the building. This had to be sliced up with a pavement saw and jackhammered out, stretching out the demolition phase by several weeks. More weeks followed filling and fairing the wavy concrete slab upon which the building rested, in preparation for a new hardwood floor.

The weighty concrete-and-mesh ceiling, saturated by decades of moisture from the leaky roof, came slamming down in clouds of black dust – finally exposing the rafters for what may have been the most important repair work of all. We had huge new beams of remarkably clear fir specially milled in Port Angeles. The roof was jacked up from below, and the construction team spent a white-knuckle afternoon in the rafters, removing the broken joists and inching the new ones into place, where they were bolted securely between the original steel plates.

We found a professional slater on Vashon Island to patch up the roof – still the original, century-old slate tiles – and by summer 2019, with the building envelope secured, we were ready to start putting things back together.

But we’d already had some amazing surprises along the way.

It’s a brick building, so of course restoring the masonry was a big component of the project. Masons from Masonry Restoration Consulting replaced two damaged sandstone sills with newly harvested stones, reopening windows bricked over in the 1940s, patching holes and voids, rebuilding arches and one whole section of wall where the Navy punched a door through.

Gifts from the past

The most remarkable aspect of the Fort Ward bakery restoration proved to be the number of original elements we discovered and returned to the building. Not just vintage – original.

We are told by the architectural historians that this sort of thing doesn’t really happen, except this time it did.

It started like this: In summer 2017, a neighbor drove up and said he’d been following the project in the newspaper, and that he had the bakery’s original front doors. We were agape.

Seriously. The original front doors.

Yes, he said, Come up and see!

We grabbed a tape measure and the 1908 blueprints for reference, and ran after him to his home, one of the old NCO quarters built the same year as the bakery and just up the hill. There, hanging on his garden shed were a pair of massive fir doors – 90 inches high, 36 inches wide, a hefty 2-1/4 inches thick, just like in the plans.

Oh, he added, and I think I have a couple of the curved windows too. To our amazement, sitting in his garage were the unmistakable fanlight windows from the old photos. And their provenance was true. A longtime Fort Ward resident, he’d salvaged them years earlier from a crumbling shed next to the bakery, where they’d been stored since being taken out of the building the 1960s.

He generously gave us the windows on the spot (perhaps recognizing that having found them, we weren’t going to let them out of our sight), and promised to give us the doors whenever we got far enough along to restore and reuse them. Stripping, filling, sanding and refinishing those century-old planks would be an intensive six-month project of its own, but that’s a story for another day.

Then in December 2018, when we finally tore out the last of the old raised floor, more discoveries: two more original doors, and a knee brace for the front porch, unmistakable from the old photos. These too we restored, refinished and put back in place.

There was one more find. Sometime in the 1940s, the Navy had altered the building’s south face, swapping a doorway with a window for reasons that are unclear. In the process, the sandstone sill under the window vanished and was lost to time…. until summer 2019, when neighbors in the old stables building down the street read about the project and said they had an original stone. They’d found it in an open field between the buildings, and for the last twenty years had used it as a bench on their back porch. We carted it back to the bakery, called the masons back, and a few days later it was back where it belonged.

So in total, eight significant original elements – four doors, two fanlight windows, a sandstone sill and a knee brace from the front facade – have been put back into the building, after more than 50 years scattered about the neighborhood.

What were the odds of that?

At this point we must acknowledge and honor the wisdom of the couple who bought the bakery in the early 1960s after the Navy moved out, a Mr. and Mrs. Snydo. It was the Snydos who raised the floor and enclosed the porch, displacing those marvelous old doors and windows. Rather than sending them to the dump, they had the apparent foresight to believe that someone, someday, might come along and want these precious items again, maybe even put them back into place.

Turns out that someone was us.

Remarkably, along the way we located the bakery’s original front doors, salvaged years earlier by neighbors David and Joyce Stettler, who hung them on their garden shed. They also had the original fanlight windows, all of which they donated to the restoration. These priceless original elements were restored to the building for the first time since they were removed more than 50 years ago.

Putting the pieces back together

We could go on at length about the rest of the project, but here we’ll economize a bit. Besides framing in new partition walls to create a kitchen, restrooms, a storage room and office, rewiring and re-plumbing, adding a modern and efficient (and 100 percent donated) heat pump system – oh, and building a parking lot and full stormwater system outside – here are a few of the significant details.

New sandstone sills: To replace the smashed sills on the north face, the masons commissioned two new stones from a quarry near Fall City. The stones were harvested and hewn to the proper profile by a local carver and installed in summer 2019. No concrete reproductions here – real sandstone.

Genuine wood windows: When we took our project to the local Historic Preservation Commission for their blessing in 2016, the first thing we heard was, “You’re not going to use vinyl windows, are you?” Guess not! But cheap windows were never in the plans, and anyway the bible of restoration – The Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for the Treatment of Historic Properties, with Guidelines For Preserving, Rehabilitating, Restoring & Reconstructing Historic Buildings – calls for using original materials wherever possible, replacing like with like. So with the window openings restored to their true dimensions, we splurged a little (actually a lot) on top-grade, genuine wood windows from Pella, gridded to match the patterns of the originals.

Transoms: Transom windows inside and out are a key feature of period buildings throughout Fort Ward and our sister forts up and down the coast. So we took the smaller of our two originals to Bainbridge Artisan Resource Network (BARN) wood shop, and asked if they could make one exactly like it – plus five more in various sizes. While they’d never built windows, the craftsmen took it on as a service project and a challenge. They produced astonishingly accurate copies that are now arrayed in doorways throughout the building. It might be the detail of which we’re most proud.

Interior doorways: We modeled two of the interior doorways, arched masonry affairs with transoms leading off the main hall, to evoke similar doorways we found at the guardhouse at Fort Stevens, Ore.

Baseboards: Milled extra tall and with a vintage profile to match baseboards found in other buildings around the fort. Years ago a neighbor had a special router bit cut to match the vintage baseboard profile while restoring his own home, and now passes the bit around as others need it. Of course we were going to use that.

Vintage light fixtures: Of 21 light fixtures inside the restored building, 13 were salvaged from “old Fort Ward” over the years and donated to the project by neighbors. Three ornate glass fixtures came from the fort’s gymnasium/post exchange (once the hub of the Station S top-secret radio operations) and now light the community hall’s kitchen.

Miscellaeous details that still seemed really important: When we had to buy new, we tried to look old – period-correct 5-panel, solid fir interior doors, vintage styled hardware and so forth. Probably a few other details we’re forgetting in the moment, but this story is getting rather long….

With the main hall finally restored to its full dimensions, attention turned to details like transom windows, new solid fir doors, and trimming out the windows to match what we found in buildings throughout the fort. For the window sills, we had special 5/4 poplar milled by Edensaw in Port Townsend. Transom windows are custom made to the original specs by the BARN wood shop of Bainbridge Island. A ductless heat pump system warm the building efficiently, a 100 percent donation from Bainbridge Heating & Air. In this image, the hardwood floor is installed but not finished. (It’s finished now – flooring material donated by Port Madison Wood Floors.)

Pandemic pause, to present

The puzzle pieces generally came together in 2020.

The original front doors were rehung, and the beautiful big fanlight put back into place, after being out of the building for more than five decades then miraculously found up the street.

There was touch-up painting to do inside and out. The interpretive displays by a local graphic artist came back from the print shop. The new hardwood floor in the main hall (another donation) got its final buffing. The kitchen – which, to honor the bakery’s original purpose, would feature a double oven – was brilliantly pieced together pro bono by a neighborhood builder.

Someday soon, we hoped, the aroma of fresh-baked bread would go wafting through the hall once again, perhaps from a community baking class.

Then came the pandemic, and the project – like the rest of the world – took a long pause.

We were left to wait it out, and reflect.

First, we could not have accomplished any of this without Kitsap County Sewer District No. 7’s foresight and original investment, securing the building years before any tangible restoration or funding plan could take shape. Likewise for the Bainbridge Park District, whose construction team (David Harry, Casey Shortbull and William Doyle) proved extraordinarily skilled at both structural and finish work and keenly attuned to the exactitudes and passion of historic preservation. Gratitude also to the scores of funders who supported our project financially, even when we had nothing to show them but a vision, some old photos and a good yarn.

Along the way we struck up a friendship with the folks at Fort DuPont, Del., where our bakery-twin resides. We shared resources and even flew out to see their building, stepping into that parallel world and experiencing another fort steeped in Coast Artillery Corps history much like our own. Inspired by our project, the Fort DuPont team moved restoration of their bakery toward the top of a years-long project list, to bring it back to its former glory.

Through the National Archives at College Park, Md., the Archives’ Sand Point, Wash. annex, and various private sources, we’ve discovered many new-old photos and archival materials that enriched our interpretive materials.

Interest in the bakery restoration was fueled by three years of Living History Walks (2016-18), where we led visitors to the many historic homes, gun batteries, the Parade Ground and other sites that speak of the fort’s rich history in defense of our country through two world wars. Those events always sold out, and may someday return. The Fort Ward story is carried forward.

Those high school sophomores who were our first ambassadors? They parlayed their volunteer experience (and superhuman smarts) into successful college admissions; some are even through graduate school now and off into young careers. Time has indeed flown.

Our “grownup” phase of the project took longer than planned – who could have foreseen a global pandemic that would pull us all apart and delay the community hall for two years? We won a big historic preservation award from the State of Washington in 2020 – which, with the pandemic cloud hanging over everything, we couldn’t really celebrate. 2021 wasn’t much better. Even final sign-off and a quiet, “soft” opening in mid-2022 felt tentative, provisional. It’s not inaccurate to say that the Fort Ward bakery project is being dedicated in a much different world than when we started.

It seems only now, in spring 2023, that a building envisioned to bring people together can finally, with confidence and some measure of care, do just that.

So now the story begins anew – our little historic bakery begins a fresh chapter as Fort Ward Community Hall, one written by the neighbors, families and friends who gather there.

Fort Ward Community Hall

1910 US Army Coast Artillery Corps Bakery Restoration

Bainbridge Island, WA

Conceived 2014-15 • Completed 2022 • Dedicated 2023

A partnership of Friends of Fort Ward, Bainbridge Island Metro Park & Recreation District, and Kitsap County Sewer District No. 7

Architect: Wenzlau Architects, Bainbridge Island

General Contractor: Bainbridge Island Metro Park & Recreation District

Engineering: Browne Wheeler Engineers, Bainbridge Island

Masonry: Masonry Restoration Consulting, Lake Stevens

Grantors & Community

Business & Corporate

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