About Poulsbo
Poulsbo, Washington, with a population of 7,560, is located in the northern part of Kitsap County and is 4.5 square miles in area. Liberty Bay, originally called Dog Fish Bay, and the majestic, snow-peaked Olympic Mountains to the west induced the Scandinavians to settle in Poulsbo because the area was so similar to the fjords of Norway.
During the Scandinavian migration of the 1880s, Poulsbo was founded by Jorgen Eliason, who came to Poulsbo from Fordefjord, Norway with his sister and his young son. A month later Iver B. Moe arrived from Paulsbo, Norway via Minnesota with his wife and three sons. When Moe felt there were enough people in the area to warrant a post office, he submitted an application calling the new town Paulsbo. Because the Postmaster General misread Moe's handwriting, the new town was officially listed as Poulsbo.
The first twenty-five years saw Poulsbo become a well-established community with a post office and school established in 1886, a Norwegian Lutheran Church (Fordefjord Lutheran) in 1887, an orphans home in 1891, a hotel in 1892, The Kitsap County Herald in 1900, a telephone company in 1907, a bank in 1909 and a codfish company in 1911.
Poulsbo had its first town Council meeting on January 7, 1908 and became incorporated as a town on January 14, 1908. Poulsbo became an incorporated city on June 14, 1913 and took on its current structure as a non-charter code city on December 3, 1969. Poulsbo is governed by a Mayor and seven-member Council.
During those early years, water was the primary method of travel. Supplies were brought the eighteen-mile trip from Seattle by rowboat and later by steamboat. Over a sixty-year period, the "mosquito fleet", comprised of more than a dozen steamboats, served Poulsbo and other locations along Liberty Bay and Puget Sound carrying passengers and freight to and from Poulsbo and delivering farmers' produce to Pike Place Market in Seattle.
Poulsbo experienced a major and permanent change during World War II when some 300 residential units were constructed near the center of Poulsbo by the military for defense workers at the nearby naval installations. Prior to the war, Norwegian was the predominant language spoken in Poulsbo, however, that changed forever as the population tripled in a three-year period. People of varying ethnic and religious backgrounds came to live in Poulsbo and help with the defense effort. The sneak attack on Pearl Harbor was a great shock to the people of Poulsbo since many of the residents worked at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton where the salvaged battleships were restored and modernized.
In the mid-1970s Poulsbo underwent a second major change with the arrival of the Trident nuclear submarines at the SUBASE Bangor naval installation just six miles west of the city. To meet the impacts caused by the dramatically increased population, the city's sewer, water and street systems were upgraded with the assistance of federal grant funding.
Today Poulsbo is a thriving, growing community with many amenities that attract tourists and encourage people to move to this area. Tourism is one of the major industries in the area, however, several new high-tech businesses have relocated to the Poulsbo area and others are considering a move to Poulsbo in the future. Poulsbo, with its picturesque downtown core of rosemaled storefronts as well as other shopping areas at Poulsbo Village and along Viking Avenue, offers many amenities to citizens and guests. These include several beautiful parks throughout the city, a boardwalk along Liberty Bay, the Valborg Oyen Public Library, three marinas, interesting gift shops, delicious bakeries, a panoramic view of Liberty Bay and the Olympic Mountains, good schools including the Olympic College satellite campus that opened to students in January 2004, efficient police and fire protection, an active Chamber of Commerce and Historic Downtown Poulsbo Association and a caring community.
Poulsbo is the leading community on both the Kitsap and Olympic peninsulas for design, construction and deployment of publicly-owned fiber-optic broadband infrastructure, providing state-of-the-art high-speed connections to the world for commerce and government. The ultimate goal here is to provide family-wage community-based employment opportunities for our citizens while protecting family and environmental values from the degradation resultant from long hours of commuting in vehicles to the east Puget Sound cities for primary employment.
The city's leaders are progressive and forward looking and are conscientiously working to widen the tax base of the area and bring Poulsbo into the twenty-first century a healthy, thriving city while maintaining the Scandinavian heritage that earned Poulsbo the nickname "Little Norway".
