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Seattle Now & Then: San Juan Island lime kilns, ca. 1890s

jrsherrard

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THEN: John McMillin’s Hotel de Haro started life as a workers’ bunkhouse. It stands below kiln batteries and timber trestles of the Tacoma and Roche Harbor Lime Company. In this late 19th century photo, the hillside has been heavily logged. Most of the San Juan archipelago’s old-growth Douglas fir went into the kilns as fuel. (Courtesy San Juan Historical Museum)
NOW: The Reuben Tarte family bought the shuttered lime works in 1956, and spent three decades clearing industrial remains. Today, the property is part of Roche Harbor Resort, which is owned by the Rich Komen family and Saltchuk Resources. On the former kiln’s brick-lined courtyard, members of the Munro family gather for a reunion. (Jean Sherrard)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Sept. 17, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Sept. 20, 2026

A Burning Past:
Long before it was a resort destination, the limestone industry shaped Roche Harbor
By Jean Sherrard

Two hundred million years ago, limey mud and reef life settled on a sea floor off ancient Asia. Tectonic drift carried the rock east; glaciers later scraped it bare. What emerged, on the north end of San Juan Island, was limestone — the raw material of lime, the mortar that has bound masonry for centuries.

From the 1860s into the 1920s, the island was an industrial

Kevin Loftus, director of the San Juan Historical Museum, stands between a reconstruction of a kiln firebox, left, and a cutaway model showing the log-cribbed hopper above and the draw doors below. The models were designed and created for the museum by islander Charlie Sink. (Jean Sherrard)

powerhouse. Workers converted stone to lime, used in concrete, in smelting and in processing wood pulp. It was even sent to Hawai’i to fertilize cane fields and purify sugar.

In 1859, a survey declared that limestone had been found nowhere else within U.S. territory in Puget Sound. Early island settlers shrewdly invested in lime production, among them the infamous Lyman Cutlar, whose killing of an English pig that same year touched off an international standoff called the Pig War. British Royal Marines, garrisoned there during the joint occupation that followed, burned lime of their own for the whitewash and mortar.

A surviving Roche Harbor kiln stands roughly 30 feet high and 18 feet square. Three to four cords of split timber fed a single kiln for one day’s burn. Below the kiln, Sophia Rose, of Bothell, takes a turn on a resort bocce court. (Jean Sherrard)

As Boyd C. Pratt, San Juan Island historian and author of “Lime: Quarrying and Limemaking in the San Juan Islands” (Mulno Cove Creations), writes, quarrying was “heavy, loud and dusty work that required a great deal of strength and endurance.” Each 30-foot kiln swallowed up to 15 tons of rock and burned round-the-clock at 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit, driving carbon dioxide out of the stone.

What remained carried its own hazard. Quicklime reacts violently with water, generating enough heat to ignite — making shipment by sea, the region’s primary means of transport, a dangerous business.

Tacoma and Roche Harbor company owner John S. McMillin, circa 1920. (Courtesy San Juan Historical Museum)

Competition was fierce, but one entrepreneur dominated. Beginning in 1886, John S. McMillin’s Tacoma and Roche Harbor Lime Company shipped product worldwide from the island’s deep-water harbor, outlasting every other lime operation in the county. Most closed by the 1930s.

His company town at Roche Harbor employed 800 workers at its height — Cornish quarrymen early on, then Japanese, later Croatians and Scandinavians. Like other industrialists of the era, McMillin housed and supplied workers through a company store. He also owned the plant that made the shipping barrels, the enterprise’s one reliably profitable piece, even as the lime company pleaded lean years and skipped its dividends.

“Some would call him a benevolent autocrat,” says Kevin Loftus, director of the San Juan Historical Museum. “Others might call him a robber baron.”

Either way, geology had the last word. The best rock near the kilns was exhausted, and what remained lay too far off to be worth hauling. In 1956, the last fires were banked.

Today, Roche Harbor is a resort, popular for weddings. Two original kilns stand sentinel, a few feet from McMillin’s former hotel, which still houses guests.

WEB EXTRAS

To watch our narrated 360 degree video at San Juan Island’s Roche Harbor, CLICK HERE!

 

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