Unique Mailboxes of Bainbridge Island: Carriers of Creativity
Bainbridge is no ordinary place. Telltale signs of the island’s creativity abound in fascinating ways. Mysterious forces are at work dreaming, imagining, hammering, carving, welding, painting, and building. Toiling in workrooms from Agate Point to Fort Ward and driven by the need to fashion from the ordinary, the extraordinary, such forces are gifted with seeing the yet unseen, imagining the yet unimagined and creating the rarest of creative classifications, the Bainbridge Island Mailbox.
Not your standard issue mailboxes, these standouts are joyful roadside reminders of a long flowing current of individuality running through Bainbridge beginning with the Suquamish who carved the petroglyph rock at Agate Passage. Haleets is thought to be a boundary marker but its depiction of six faces of varying sizes and adornments could just as well be decoded as the tribe proclaiming this is uniquely us, this is who we are, welcome to our home.
Bainbridge’s wildly expressive modern-day mailboxes are similarly imbued with shimmering island soul and spirit. Like the petroglyph, they are without pretense, reflecting the beauty of unselfconscious expression, begging further investigation.
Mailbox as storyteller provides an unlikely entree to understanding the spectrum of Bainbridge Island’s history, culture, and artistry from a refreshingly lighthearted, neutral perspective. There are over one hundred handcrafted mailboxes on the island. Let’s begin with the story of a local tribe of sorts, the Strom family.
Two well-loved and dearly cherished mailboxes are the 1949 Packard and Bob’s Big Boy both belonging to the Strom’s. Three generations and five Strom families live on the original twenty-acres of land on West Port Madison Road purchased in 1946 by Leonard and Wicky Strom for $3,600 which according to their son Dick, “was a reasonable price even back then”. The purchase included fifty chickens, an unfinished house, and a 1930 Ford Model A, all accounted for on a hand-written receipt on lined kindergarten paper . . .
To read more head over to Bainbridge Currents