Community

Gig Harbor Now and Then | Barged from Bremerton

Posted on September 7th, 2026 By: Greg Spadoni

Initiated by Carl Campen, the Gig Harbor Now and Then local history question of the week from Aug 24 asked what a specific group of seven houses in Gig Harbor had in common in 1954. Three of the houses are outlined on the aerial photo below.

Pierce County Assessor-Treasurer aerial base map.

The answer is that all seven were barged into Gig Harbor from Bremerton. They were temporary housing for defense workers during World War II.

Boom and bust

The Bremerton area experienced a major housing shortage when the war began and ended with a huge surplus when the war ended. When they were no longer needed, hundreds of small houses were sold off and moved to other towns.

The Peninsula House Moving Company, which handled the relocation of the seven houses to Gig Harbor in 1954, also moved 200 of them to Richland in 1948. That city needed more residences for the growing population working for the Atomic Energy Commission at Hanford.

The Richland-bound houses were “knocked down into sections,” allowing flatbed semi-trailers to carry several units at a time. The 768-square-foot Gig Harbor-bound houses (which may have been a different type of building) were moved intact, which necessitated some unusual procedures.

Negotiating Gig Harbor streets

Twelve-year-old Carl Campen witnessed — or, as he told me, closely supervised — a couple of the house moves through the Harbor. After the barges offloaded them at the old Galbraith sawmill property (where the east end of the Harbor History Museum is today), he recalled workers on foot leading the truck as it towed each house to its permanent lot. They used long poles to lift low utility wires high enough to clear the houses’ peaks.

The small house that was moved to Rosedale Street next to the entrance of the St. Nicholas Catholic Church parking lot had a problem with the intersection of Rosedale Street and Stinson Avenue, Carl told me. Even without a ridiculously small roundabout mucking up the works, the towing truck was unable to make the left-hand turn onto Rosedale Street.

The solution was to have Spadoni Brothers move some of their road construction equipment to the back side of their yard at the southwest corner of the intersection. That allowed the house-towing truck to turn right on Rosedale, then immediately left into Spadoni’s yard, back onto Stinson in the opposite direction, and finally turning right onto Rosedale Street.

Unable to make the left-hand turn onto Rosedale Street while coming up the hill on Stinson Avenue, the truck-and-house combination instead looped through the equipment yard of Spadoni Brothers. Pierce County Assessor-Treasurer aerial base map.

Familiar Gig Harbor names

Rose and Nick Tarabochia were the new owners who bought the surplus housing in Bremerton and had the units moved to Gig Harbor. Once in place, they renovated each one and put them up for rent. The Tarabochia family still owns some of the seven.

Speaking of old houses: hidden treasures

You never know what you’ll find when you clean out a previously occupied house. The likelihood of discovering something interesting increases with the number of years the previous owner spent living there.

Years ago, I helped my siblings clean out our parents’ house. It had about 70 years’ worth of life’s accumulations. As to be expected, a lot of things we found were surprising. Not necessarily interesting or valuable, but surprising.

Completely unsurprising was the total amount of useless stuff in the house. But you have to sift through all of it to see if any has value, either sentimental or financial.

One of the surprises that I found was a four-cent Project Mercury First Day Issue postage stamp. As an added bonus, it was on an envelope and canceled with a Cape Canaveral postmark.

This four-cent Project Mercury First Day Issue canceled postage stamp comes with the envelope it was originally glued to, which sports the iron oxide print of the paper clip that was attached to it for over 50 years in a sometimes-damp basement.

You don’t see those every day. I’d never seen one before. But there it was. An authentic artifact from the dawn of the Space Age. Not in perfect condition, but still a tangible piece of American history.

Surely this is a find with some financial value. After all, it’s not simply a local curiosity. It is of broad interest across the entire USA and in many other countries around the world.

Lucky for me, we have today the advantage of the internet to tell us the value of such finds. This one has to be worth a good amount because it must be rare. Let’s see …

Finding of fact

On Feb. 20, 1962, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth, aboard the Friendship 7 capsule. His was only the third manned flight of Project Mercury, and the first orbital spaceflight of the USA.

Issue date: February 20, 1962.

Printed by: the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.

So far, so good.

A variety of sites on the internet tell us that “The Project Mercury Issue became the first U.S. postage stamp to be issued on the same day as the event it commemorated.”

That’s got to count for something.

(The Russians had already orbited the Earth, but their commemorative stamp wasn’t issued until the day after the launch — just one of the many reasons the Soviet Union collapsed.)

How rare?

The symbolic importance is certainly there. Because it represents the beginning of NASA’s manned orbital space flight, the degree of desire and demand by collectors must be healthy. The only remaining considerations are supply and availability.

The good news is that only 289 million of them were ever issued!

How valuable?

What could it be sold for? Let’s put it this way: if you were to buy an uncanceled one today, you’d have to pay 40 cents. Need I point out that’s 10 times what it cost when new?

If you wanted to buy a canceled one today, you’d be hard-pressed to find one for less than 35 cents.

But the one I found is still stuck to the original-issue envelope and has a Cape Canaveral postmark. Add that to the mix, and you’re beginning to talk real money: four bucks. Woo-hoo!

Yep, it sure pays for several people to sift through 19 heaping pickup truck loads of junk before hauling it to the dump. Just three or four hundred more gems like the Project Mercury First Day Issue would’ve almost covered the dump fees.

Local history question of the week

The subject of the next column, on Sept. 21, will be the answer to this question:

How long have Gig Harbor commercial fishermen and women been waiting for a fully functional home port dock?

(Including “fully functional” is a necessary technicality. They did have a partially functional make-do dock many, many, many years ago.)

Recent events concerning the matter make the short answer 14 years. But if you bet money on the long answer being anywhere near that number, you’ll be wiped out.

A rare opportunity

If you are reading this on or before Wednesday, Sept. 23, have I got an offer for you!

On that day, at 5 p.m., will be Gig Harbor Now’s annual fundraiser. This year it’s being held in the beautiful new multipurpose building at Kopachuck State Park. It will feature a dinner, an auction, and some kind of entertainment, although I have been assured that it won’t be a dunk tank for the contributing writers.

The items up for auction are pretty darned good, including:

A weekend wine getaway in Prosser, including lodging, meals and winery tours.
Hand-blown vases and other works from the Seattle Glassblowing Studio.
Wine-tasting and charcuterie for up to 15 people at Gig Harbor’s Spruce Hill Winery.
A sculpture by renowned local artist Tom Torrens.
A *double-magnum* of a 2014 Nappa Valley Reserve.
A tour for two on the Gig Harbor Gondola.
A Cheney Stadium suite for a Tacoma Rainiers game.

The list of goods and services could’ve been even a little better, but nobody asked for my input. I can probably see why, though. My contributions would’ve taken just a bit of the shine off all the others.

The first thing I would’ve suggested was to auction off the 19 Marlborough filter cigarettes I have left over from the photoshoot for the Sept. 23, 2024 Gig Harbor Now and Then column on fatal smoking-related diseases.

My second suggestion for the auction would’ve been the completely unique, one-of-a-kind, 15.5-oz. can of 120-volt garbanzo beans that was featured in Gig Harbor Now and Then No. 18.

Can you imagine the bidding frenzy that would’ve created? Definitely an opportunity missed.

But I’m going to contribute in another meaningful way — no, not by staying away. I will be there.

I’m not sure what I’ll be doing — bussing tables, maybe; peeling potatoes or parking cars? I don’t know. Whatever it might be, I will be there.

For any of you who’d like to attend and help keep this column going, it will also be a rare opportunity to yell at me in person for any stupid column I’ve written that you’ve hated or disagreed with.

You can even bitch me out for not covering a topic you’d like to read about.

You’ll have to buy a ticket first (it is, after all, a fundraiser), and you can do that by going here.

While in this case yelling at me is not free, in general, many have found it deeply satisfying.

Be aware, however, that immediately before I leave for the event, I’m going to watch the last four minutes of The Three Stooges’ short In the Sweet Pie and Pie.

Several times, making mental notes.

— Greg Spadoni, September 7, 2026

Greg Spadoni of Olalla has had more access to local history than most life-long residents. During 25 years in road construction working for the Spadoni Brothers, his first cousins, twice removed, he traveled to every corner of the Gig Harbor and Key Peninsulas, taking note of many abandoned buildings, overgrown farms, and roads that no longer had a destination. Through his current association with the Harbor History Museum in Gig Harbor as the unofficial Chief (and only) Assistant to Linda McCowen, the Museum’s primary photo archive volunteer, he regularly studies the area’s largest collection of visual history. Combined with the print history available at the museum and online, he has uncovered countless stories of long-forgotten local people and events.