Governor Evans and the Eight Ferry Routes

Washington State Ferries took over Puget Sound's ferry network in 1951, buying out the Puget Sound Navigation Company — known as the Black Ball Line — after a labor dispute stranded commuters and the state stepped in. By the mid-1960s it was the largest ferry system in the United States, running routes from Seattle's Coleman Dock across the Sound to the Kitsap Peninsula, to island communities otherwise unreachable by road, and north to the San Juan archipelago, including a crossing to Sidney, British Columbia.

The eight routes range from Hood Canal in the south to the international border. Route 1 follows Hood Canal, which the text calls "a fiord-like arm of water" — a narrow saltwater inlet running nearly the full length of the Olympic Mountain Range. Reaching it in 1965 meant driving across the Hood Canal Bridge, a concrete pontoon span (the deck floats on anchored hollow concrete cylinders) that had opened in August 1961, then the longest floating bridge over saltwater in the world at just under 7,900 feet.

Daniel J. Evans was inaugurated as Washington's 16th governor in January 1965, age 39, having beaten three-term incumbent Albert Rosellini in the November 1964 election. His signature on the inside welcome panel pins this brochure to his first year in office. Evans went on to serve three terms through 1977 and is remembered as a significant figure in Pacific Northwest conservation.

The cover photograph shows one of the fleet's large double-ended vessels — the green-and-white hull livery that identified WSF boats from the 1950s onward — crossing the Sound under clear skies. Twelve destinations appear on the cover's lower band, from Hurricane Ridge on the Olympic Peninsula to Vancouver Island, giving the brochure as much the character of a regional tourism pitch as a ferry schedule supplement.