November 2007 55
Donnell, who obtained a claim
of 320 acres in 1866 along the
Dungeness River, and began
raising wheat. He was followed
by several other homesteaders,
among whom was John Bell,
with a 160 acre homestead
along Bell Creek. The Bell
family dug a deep well, crucial
to farming the dry lands, and
welcomed other settlers, who
bought lots from the original
homesteaders.
The first post office was called
Seguin, and was established on
August 13, 1879 with Abram
Figure 2 Seguin, Washington Terr Sept 27/87—One of the Earliest Known H. Manning as first postmas-
Manuscript Markings from Sequim (courtesy Tim Boardman).
ter. One of the earliest known
in their dialect as Such-e-kwai-ing. ‘Sequim’ is the
manuscript markings from
nearest approximation of the Klallam word, meaning
Seguin is pictured above, dated September 27, 1887.
“quiet water
While the present town center of Sequim is three miles
.” The Klallam applied it to the harbor,
but white settlers extended it to the prairie and the
away from the sound, the first post office, like the
town. Historically, the Klallam people lived in vil-
lages throughout the northern Olympic Pen-
insula. When settlers began arriving in the
1860s, homesteaders pushed most of the
Klallam from their traditional homes. The
native people were not considered U.S. citi-
zens, and were unable to obtain title to their
ancestral holdings. When the 1884 Indian
Homestead Act passed, several Klallam
families eventually became land owners, but
it wasn’t until the 1970s that tribal reserves
were established for them.
Before the 1860s, there had been very little Map 2 Early mail connections to Seguin were via a water route from
white settlement on the northeast tip of the
Port Townsend as shown in this portion of the 1883 Postal Route
Olympic peninsula, and towns were located
Map of Oregon & Washington.
on the straits and oriented to the water, where
the mail arrived by steamer. The earliest town in the
original Klallam village, had a water-side location at
vicinity of what would later become Sequim was New
the neck of Sequim Bay, earlier named Washington
Dungeness, (Dungeness) which had its first post of-
Harbor.
fice established in 1858. Port Townsend’s post office,
about 17 miles to the east, was only six years earlier
About a year after the Seguin post office was estab-
than this.
lished, it moved for a short time about three miles
south to the far end of the Bay, at a ramshackle fish
Clallam County was created in 1854, but it took about
cannery where the town of Blyn would later be sited
a dozen years before lands were sectioned off for sale
(map 2). The cannery was owned by the second post-
through Donation Land Claims, opening up the
master, Benjamin F. Dean, who served from Novem-
flatlands south of Dungeness for settlement. The first
ber 29, 1880 to May 31, 1883. Ramsey reports that
homesteader to come to the Sequim area was John W.
Postmaster Dean either “went (himself) or sent some-
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