Pierce County Library at Browns Pt. School

Mrs. Jerry Darling established the first Pierce County branch library in a corner of the Browns Point School building. Mrs. McBee, who lived across the road from the school, was the librarian. Children loved to speculate about her age as she was the kind of person we all remember as always looking old, but being perennial and legendary. Books from the main branch in Tacoma were brought weekly and rotated.

First Grocery Store in Browns Pt.

In 1925 Mr. Shuett built Browns Point’s first grocery store east and up the hill a short distance from today’s clubhouse. The building had an upstairs where various meetings, dances, and dinners were held. This was Browns Point’s grocery store for the next 25 years. It had several owners through the years. Charles Jackson was the last grocer in the old store and the first one in the new shopping center built in the 1940s.

From Wood to Concrete

The wooden lighthouse was replaced by a gleaming white concrete tower in 1933. It was built 34 feet high and 9.5 feet square. The old bell, which Oscar and Annie had so faithfully rung, was retired from lighthouse service to the College of Puget Sound, today’s University of Puget Sound. The bell had been molded in 1855 in Philadelphia and carried around Cape Horn to be first installed at the Cape of Dungeness near Port Angeles in 1860. It was brought to Browns Point in 1903 when the wooden lighthouse was built.

In 2000, the Points Northeast Historcial Society successfully reaquired the original bell for the church on Fox Island where it had resided for several years. It now hangs in the old pump house behind the cottage.