In many ways, Puget Sound looks today as it did in the eighteenth century, when its first explorers probed into the bays and inlets. The Olympics flank the west and the Cascades rise to the east with Mount Rainier looming to the south. The deep, cold water still laps against the shore, but many of the beaches have yielded to homes and industries. Instead of the dense forests, great cities, homes to millions, stretch far back from the shore. Hundreds of salmon swim up the Sound into rivers that once saw fish in the tens of millions.

Beginning a decade or two after the first American settlements, photographers captured scenes of Puget Sound’s people, ships, and communities, kept alive in archives and history books. Teeming with other photographs up to the 1970s, these striking black-and-white images in Historic Photos of Puget Sound explore life of this unique Washington region for its residents, visitors, and admirers to enjoy even now.