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Gig Harbor Now and Then | Harbor Inn history and a hose head-scratcher

The question of local history asked in this column on May 18 concerned businesses named the Harbor Inn. The building at 3111 Harborview Dr. in Gig Harbor was for years known as the Harbor Inn. But it was not the first such business in Gig Harbor with that name. The question is:

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Where is the location of Gig Harbor’s previous Harbor Inn?

Several good clues and one useless clue were provided, the good ones being that the building still exists today, is in excellent condition, and operated as the Harbor Inn in the 1920s

 Answer: The second house up from the bottom of Peacock Hill Avenue, on the right.

The Harbor Inn previous to the one on Harborview Drive was on Peacock Hill Avenue. Pierce County Assessor-Treasurer base map.

The Peacock Hill version of the Harbor Inn was a well-established family home converted into a boarding house in 1921, but also served as a sort of hotel for very short-term stays. The hotel aspect of the business took advantage of the traffic using the Pierce County ferry landing at the bottom of Peacock Hill Avenue, just 500 or so feet down the hill.

A short 1927 advertisement in the Peninsula Gateway noted that board and room there cost $10 a week, offering “home atmosphere, home cooking.”

The Pierce County ferry landing moved to the other end of the harbor in 1923, and a private ferry service that docked at the head of the bay didn’t last much longer.

Yet the Harbor Inn on Peacock Hill operated through most of the 1920s. Its time as a boarding house may have ended with the death of one of the owners in 1929. The last reference found of the building being called the Harbor Inn was in October 1930, though it may not have been active at that time. When its days as a boarding house were over, it reverted back to being a single-family home, and still is to this day.

Carefully worded

I deliberately didn’t call the Peacock Hill Harbor Inn location Gig Harbor’s first by that name. It was not. I called it the previous location. The widow Carrie Matilda Garretson had a summer home in Gig Harbor that she named Harbor Inn, at least as early as 1920. It was on the abandoned military reservation 33, on the east side of the bay — almost, but not quite, due east of the much later Harbor Inn Restaurant. It has since been replaced by a modern house, but perhaps the memory of the Harbor Inn still lingers. Or, if not, should the current residents see this column, maybe that memory will be revived.

The first known Harbor Inn at Gig Harbor was Carrie Garretson’s summer cabin on the east side of the bay. Pierce County Assessor-Treasurer base map.

New business: Believe it or Don’t

We shift now from fairly distant history to recent history. Very recent.

On May 22 past, at precisely 11:19 a.m., I arrived at the parking lot south of the HomeGoods home décor store in Uptown Gig Harbor. Not because I intended to go into the store, but because I was meeting Tonya Strickland there to set out on a Kelp brick hunt.

It was a fine, warm, sunny day, so to kill time before she arrived, I set about taking a brisk walk.

The walk had barely started when I noticed some kind of debris in the line of parking spaces two rows over. While I’m not the only one whose curiosity would compel a closer inspection, there were no other cars or pedestrians in that entire row, or the one next to it. So it was up to me alone to find out if it was trash or treasure.

It turned out not to be trash, and while the object itself was not a treasure, it did lead to a minor adventure, in a bizarre sort of way.

The object was a gasoline pump hose and nozzle.

Photo by Tonya Strickland

Someone had obviously driven away from a gas station with the nozzle still in their car’s gas filler pipe. The breakaway joint in the hose had done its job.

It takes over 300 pounds of force to break that joint, so there’s no way the driver didn’t know it had been pulled loose, or at least that something somewhat calamitous had happened. But instead of stopping, the car drove away. It pulled into the empty parking lot near the HomeGoods store, where the hose was removed and abandoned, laying there for hours until the first nosey dork happened by.

Photo by Tonya Strickland

Now what?

What to do, what to do …

It took all of three seconds to decide what I should do with the inadvertently stolen goods. I picked it up, drained out what gas was still in the hose (or so I thought), and put it in the back of my truck so that nobody else would find it and walk off with it. After all, it would probably look good in some goober’s man cave.

I then continued my brisk walk, now in the direction of the Safeway Fuel Station (it sells diesel as well as gasoline), a thousand or so feet away. If it wasn’t missing a pump hose, my next stop would be the Sinclair station at the southwest corner of Olympic and Point Fosdick drives.

Pierce County Assessor-Treasurer map.

There it wasn’t

When I arrived at the Safeway gas station, pump No. 4 was missing a hose, with a sign on a tall traffic cone informing customers of that pump only dispensing diesel.

Photo by Tonya Strickland

I went into the store and spoke with the manager, Eric. I told him I’d found the hose, and that I’d return it in a few minutes. I walked back to my truck, and met up with Tonya when she arrived.

“We have a story to investigate,” I told her. It wasn’t much of a story, but it was something.

I lifted the hose and nozzle out of the back of my truck, and told Tonya I was going to walk it back instead of drive it because I could use the exercise. As it turned out, had I driven it back, I wouldn’t have ended up with enough of a story to write.

The return drip

Contrary to my thinking that I had drained all the gas out of the hose before putting it in my truck, it was still dripping out of its severed end. No more would come out of the nozzle end, so to keep it from dripping on me, I held it away well from my body, which probably looked awkward, but it wasn’t, really.

This goober doesn’t have a man cave, so he returned the hose to the gas station. Photo by Tonya Strickland.

When we reached the gas station, we had to walk past all the pumps to check in with Eric in the convenience store, and of course most of the people filling their cars looked at me with amused suspicion. More than once, I said, “It wasn’t me; I found it in the parking lot.”

I could almost hear their thoughts: “That’s a likely story!”

This doesn’t make me look guilty, does it? Photo by Tonya Strickland.

The plot thickens

A woman fueling her car at pump No. 6 found it most interesting, exclaiming for everyone at the station to hear, “I found one of those on the highway!”

She said some other things that I didn’t quite understand, so I stopped and asked her to repeat herself, which she did. The highway was in another state, or something like that, and she had pulled over and picked up the hose.

She certainly was excited to share her story. Maybe a little too excited. I didn’t get her name, but I’ll just call her Unintentional Vandal No. 2.

While Tonya lagged back to take a few pictures, I continued to the convenience store, where Eric told me to set the hose on the ground beside the door. I did, and followed him inside to have a little chat about losing nozzles and hoses.

Tonya came in and, slipping into reporter mode, asked him several questions, including how often people drive off with hoses still in their tanks. “About twice a month,” he said. That’s the moment things got weird. Some kind of commotion erupted outside.

Unintentional Vandal No. 2, having finished fueling — hardly more than a couple minutes after enthusiastically sharing her out-of-state highway gas hose recovery story — drove away with the gas nozzle still in her car, and tore the hose from the pump.

The average of two per month pales in comparison with two in five hours.

Photo by Tonya Strickland

It’s not easy to understand how someone who had watched me just two or three minutes before carry a severed hose back to the gas station and had eagerly told me about having found one herself, could then space out completely and drive away with the nozzle still in her car. Except, that is, when …

An abrupt end

There’s more to this story, specifically concerning both unintentional vandals, complete with juicy, scandalous gossip and morally superior judgements. As entertaining and satisfying as that can be, I’m rapidly approaching the word limit for this column, and at any moment will be cut off by the strict limitation of

Greg Spadoni, June 1, 2026