Fort Ward, a former military base on Bainbridge Island, is peaceful now

YOU COULDN’T ASK for a more peaceful place to put a fortress.

These days, Fort Ward on Bainbridge Island is a haven of daisy-covered lawns, wind-bent trees, quietly lapping water and seabirds having a constant klatch on crumbling wooden structures just offshore. But the site was long a place of vital activity, much of it military, as suggested by the disused, ghostly barracks that look out at one of the island’s many breathtaking views of the water.

This ideally located area has held many names over the centuries. It was originally home to the Suquamish people, led by the eponymous Chief Kitsap in the late 1700s/early 1800s when they were visited by equally eponymous explorer George Vancouver, who took the liberty of naming the entire island “Restoration Point.” The spot where Fort Ward Park now sits later came to be known as “Bean’s Point” or “Bean Point” or “Beans Point,” named after one of the island’s first white settlers, Maine-born Reuben Bean. Bean was, according to his obituary, murdered and found “some forty yards from his cabin, concealed in the bushes” in 1859. Local Native Americans were blamed, but the crime remains unsolved.

Bean’s Point was established as a U.S. Army seacoast fort in 1903 and renamed Fort Ward. The fort was one of several built to guard Puget Sound from potential attacks from the sea and protect the nearby Bremerton Naval shipyard. It was named for Col. George H. Ward, a Massachusetts-born Union officer in the Civil War who died a war hero from his wounds at Gettysburg and who very likely never set foot in Washington state. Outfitted with four batteries with pillar-mounted guns, Fort Ward guarded Rich Passage, a strait that runs the current path of the Seattle-Bremerton ferry.

In 1938, the U.S. Navy discovered that the fort’s location (and, perhaps, its glorious quiet) made it an ideal place to catch radio transmissions from Japan. The Navy took over Fort Ward for radio surveillance and it became a top-secret military listening post for Japanese naval communications known as “Station S” during the second half of World War II. To cover its activities, the Navy invented a story (that The Seattle Times covered) that it was a Naval Reserve Radio School. The fort was abandoned by the military in 1958, and in 1960 it became Fort Ward State Park. In 2011 it was transferred to Bainbridge Island and is now called Fort Ward Park.

Today, you can reach Fort Ward Park by driving through the idyll that is Bainbridge Island, so much like a quaint English village you’d expect it to have a high murder rate (beginning with Bean, it seems) and a local elderly sleuth. When you get there, you can take the main trail, a long, straight path along the water suitable for jogging or stroller-pushing. If you fancy a more romantic ramble, venture into the labyrinth of scrubby vegetation next to the water to discover overlooks and hidden benches both eerie and peaceful.

Along either trail, you’ll come across ruins of the aforementioned barracks, boarded up but seeming to be sleeping rather than dead, like a summer camp snoozing the cold months away. Along the gun mounts, enigmatic, moss-covered structures of stairs to nowhere can be seen, like some ancient altar, once home to the artillery that pointed out to sea. And at the end of the public part of the beach, some poetic soul has placed a lonely bench staring out at the sea. The bench has become encrusted with marine vegetation and seems the perfect spot for a ghostly widow to stare out at the water waiting, perhaps, for a husband who will never sail home.