History

The South Sound Story of the Longbranch Improvement Club, its Building & Marina

On the west side of the Cascades in the State of Washington among the bays and inlets of South Puget Sound lies the twenty mile long Key Peninsula. In the early decades of the 20th century, in the open spaces of cleared farmland in the forests on the peninsula surrounded by the waters of the Sound filled with salmon, shellfish, seals, and occasionally whales, there was a land of pioneering lumbermen, farmers and fishermen. Linked to the outside world by water more than road, boats and boat transportation were an essential part of the life of the people. This is the land in which the Longbranch Improvement Club came into existence.

More than eighty years ago this Improvement Club was organized by a group of people in the Longbranch area at the southern end of Key Peninsula. They had been meeting for years in local homes and sponsoring community events such as baseball games, Halloween parties and New Year's Eve dances at a building in the village called Library Hall. During the early years baseball was important in the life of the peninsula. Each community had a baseball team and their games were the major entertainment on the weekends. Teams from Steilacoom, Tacoma and Puyallup and from Anderson and McNeil Islands came to the peninsula by boat to play the Longbranch team and Longbranch traveled by water to play those towns. As time went by the games attracted so many spectators that the group began to think about a larger area for a new ball field.

This was a period of rapid change for the little village. Pierce County was planning to put in a county road to serve the local peninsula communities, even though, lacking a bridge across the Tacoma Narrows, there was no link by road with the mainland. The road would take people up the peninsula from the ferry slip at Longbranch. At about the same time a consolidated school was being planned by County education officials for the children of the Longbranch area. The school not only needed a building site but it would need an athletic field. The community group, working cooperatively, decided to take the necessary steps to become a legally constituted group that could own land and work formally for the community good.