Tag Archives: Codfish Salting

Demolition nears for old codfish processing plant – what a story it has to tell!

The building is all that remains of what was, at its founding, the first codfish processing plant north of San Francisco. Many of the untreated pilings, eroded by time, tide and critters were driven by Capt. J.A. Matheson when he built the processing plant in September 1891. By October, the former Provincetown, Massachusetts, sea captain’s schooner, Lizzie Colby, arrived from the Bering Sea with its holds full of cod, ushering in an era of fish curing and fish canning that would provide jobs for hundreds and fuel the economy of an infant city, according to news stories at the time in the Anacortes American. >10 photos, click to read< 15:15