Aberdeen has been a personal source of interest since I first traveled through the region over 30 years ago, watching a Monday night football game in a local pizza joint before retiring for the night. There was something about the town and its’ surroundings that triggered my creative mind and photographic aesthetic for lonely, abandoned and forgotten places.

Truly, that long ago visit piqued my interest to know more about the area, an interest that I did not begin to fully address until my engineering career began to wind down, affording me an opportunity to pursue new challenges. What was it that drew my interest to this fairly small waterfront town located, some would say, at the end of the road?

For millennia, Lower Chehalis native peoples living around southerly portions of the Olympic peninsula subsisted on fishing, trading, harvesting trees for canoes, and hunter gatherer activities. After the influx of western peoples, disease epidemics greatly reduced their numbers and by the 1860’s, following several treaties, many of the remaining native peoples were reestablished on reservations some distance from their historical grounds.

Arriving in the mid-19th century, non-native settlers began recognizing the wealth of natural resources, primarily in the timber and fishing industries. Multiple towns sprung up around Grays Harbor and its many tributaries, with Aberdeen eventually established as a city in 1884. The city flourished as a timber town until the Great Depression, by when the number of lumber mills had plunged from 37 to less than 10; the remainder closed by the 1980’s.

Surviving destructive fires, labor strikes, and the demise of the wooden ship building industry, Aberdeen’s claim as the Lumber Capitol of the World supported its function as a timber center, yet also brought a less than savory reputation with the accompanying saloons, gambling houses, and brothels--some of which continued offering their unique business services until the 1960’s. Such shady activities led the town to be informally nicknamed, “Hellhole of the Pacific.”

Yet today, as the financial hub of the Grays Harbor region, Aberdeen is not an abandoned, forgotten or lonely town, even while places and parts of the town evoke these very sentiments.

My memories of an old timber port from that earliest visit may have been tainted by time, but I felt that there were mysteries to uncover, and I decided to pursue those narratives. Aberdeen along with the Olympic Peninsula became a favorite photographic destination from 2020 through 2024.

There is something that draws my interest from the old and somewhat abandoned portions of Aberdeen, where the Chehalis and Wishkah Rivers confluence, the tops of patterned cutoff piles from previous piers and buildings exposed at low tide, giving a hint to the long-ago heyday of the town. What did those piers support and what did they serve? What stories they could tell, if such stories were available to be heard?

To me, Aberdeen has both the beauty inherent to the Pacific Northwest, and the moody, overcast, rainy days the region is so well known for. Her old-town alleyways exhibit both lonely desolation and the occasional, unexpected, gestures of beauty. During multiple visits I could almost decipher the whispered stories through blowing trash and graffiti-filled walls of boarded up, abandoned, and closed buildings, broken windows allowing diffused light to penetrate the shards of glass, providing a partial glimpse into buildings whose glorious history is now long past.

A Glimpse of the Past covers a nearly five-year window into Aberdeen’s recent past, depicting a sprinkling of the scenes witnessed during my walking sojourns through older portions of town.