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Two in Tow & On The Go | Check out Burley Park’s updated playground — and its fascinating history

After taking photos of several playgrounds across the region for our new Gig Harbor Now Playground Directory earlier this month, I knew one park in particular just had to get its own special shoutout.

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It’s the cool-and-quaint Burley Park at 14644 Park Drive SE, in Kitsap County. The decades-old park has turn-of-the-century beginnings in the small unincorporated community of Burley. While the site’s previous set of worn-out playground equipment wasn’t exactly ancient, Google Maps reviewers over the years have been quick to say the place was falling apart.

The park is run by the nonprofit Burley Library Association — the same group that manages Burley’s community hall, post office building and cemetery.

As it turns out, a mini makeover was just what Burley Park needed. As a bonus, it got all that and more. Springtime brought new playground equipment along with a grant-funded effort by the Kitsap Conservation District to clear out some unruly invasive plant life that had taken over, according to the association’s website. 

The playground’s swaying propeller seat. Photo by Tonya Strickland.

The Burley Park rec scene now features clean trails and space to run and play. The playground includes a sturdy set of monkey bars, a slide, a separate dome climber, baby bucket swings, and both classic and adaptive swings — including one high-back support swing for kids who need it. There’s also a neat swaying seat shaped like a propeller. 

The association is still fundraising to cover its cost of improvements. Donations are accepted on the Burley Park GoFundMe page. As of Friday, May 30, 2025, the group received four donations totaling $640 toward the new playground— less than 20 percent of its $4,000 goal.

Surrounding it all are walking trails through the woods, a grassy field for baseball, and a lovely stretch of Burley Creek that serves as a favorite spot for locals to birdwatch or dip toes in the water. In fact, the creek has long made the park a highlight for the site — even before modern slides and dome climbers.

But what makes this story especially fun to tell is that the Burley Association has been such a thoughtful steward of local history. Because of their care, the public has access to a firsthand essay by the late Katherine Stein Anderson, who came to Burley with her family from Seattle in 1896. They were among some of Burley’s earliest settlers. Katherine grew up to be longtime local and ran the Burley Store for many years before she died on April 21, 1982 at age 90.

The park’s baseball area. Photo by Tonya Strickland.

The association’s “The People & Memories of Burley” document includes Katherine’s first-person account, written more than 75 years ago, of what growing up in Burley’s earliest years was like: rowing to Horsehead Bay, building log homes, dances in the schoolhouse, planting gardens between stumps, smoked salmon. It even touches on the magic of Burley Park and its creek:

Source: Katherine Stein Anderson; BurleyAssociation.org

Most locals know Burley’s untraditional origin story of being a Brotherhood of the Co-Operative socialist experiment. But for those who don’t, Katherine’s essay will make a lot more sense after you know settlers like her parents helped clear the densely forested land to build housing, commerce and industrial buildings for their self-sustaining, model society rooted in the ideals of shared labor and collective ownership. At its heart, Burley was more than just a timber town; it was a vision. Though the movement eventually dissolved, the community it built left a lasting mark on this quiet, wooded corner of Kitsap County.

Here’s a transcribed version of what Katherine wrote about Burley Park in her above essay:

“THE PARK: Our Park was a wondrous place when my life was young. Giant cedars, firs and alders with trilliums, wild bleeding hearts, salmonberry and blackcap bushes. Not to be forgotten are the devil club bushes. We would swing over the creek on the big limbs of the cedars — pick the wild flowers, sit on the logs and talk, build play houses and tree houses. Make our own tea sets from the bank of clay next to the dam, used to supply the community with water.

The trail that wandered through the park crossed a small creek. In the creek stood a ram that pumped the water, to a tower, for the community water system. Some of the water came to the ram from a wooden flume. The constant clang of the ram could be heard from my grandparents’ house, as well as through the park. Sometimes it would stop running from loss of prime or chunks of gravel. Sometimes prankish hands would stop the constant motion. Many times we’d start it again if we were playing in the park — or were sent by Grandpa Moore, if he happened to not hear it, while working outside or walking across the road to the barn.

With the crowding of Public Recreation areas now, it is my hope, for rekindling pleasant memories there once again. Not many areas have such a pleasant place for the community.”

Here are my pictures I took in April 2025 of the park, the creek, the remnants of the creek’s dam, the water pump and even the thorny devil club bushes Katherine mentioned:

See ya out there!

@two.n.tow

Tonya Strickland is a Gig Harbor mom-of-two and longtime journalist. Now in the travel and family niche, her blog, Two in Tow & On the Go, was named among the 10 Seattle-Area Instagram Accounts to Follow by ParentMap magazine. Tonya and her husband Bowen moved to Gig Harbor from California with their two kids, Clara (11) and Wyatt (9) in 2021. Find them on Facebook for all the kid-friendly places in and around town.