Samuel and Anna Willesh Jerisich

Samuel Jerisich was born in Kotor, Montenegro, in 1833. As a young man he was a sailor, rounding Cape Horn three times. He lived in San Francisco for a while before coming to Vancouver Island, Canada. In search of good fishing grounds, he and his two companions rowed their skiff south through Puget Sound. Jerisich and his wife, Anna Willesh Henemat, a native from the Penelakut tribe on Kupyer Island, in British Columbia, Canada, settled in Gig Harbor permanently in 1867. Only their daughter Caroline, the eldest of eight children, was born at the time.

The only other people living in the harbor at that time were the Indians in a village at the head of the bay. The Jerisich family later built a larger home on their 160-acre homestead on the west side of the bay, but their first home was a one-room cabin made of split cedar boards on the east side. Their home was surrounded by dense forest choked by underbrush. There were no trails or roads. Wild animals lived in the forest. Anna shot bear and deer and dressed the meat for food. She frightened other animals away from the cabin by beating on an old washtub. She also picked and dried berries.

Sam cut down trees to clear enough land for a garden and there were plenty of fish in the harbor to eat. But if they wanted provisions besides what they could shoot, grow or catch, they had to row to Steilacoom, Olympia or the Hudson Bay Fort at Nisqually. Anna got tallow for candles and wool for knitting from the fort. Sam caught fish using nets he and Anna made by hand. He built a smoke house to smoke fish and built a rendering plant on the first dock in Gig Harbor to render dogfish oil.

He rowed the oil and smoked fish to Steilacoom to sell. This was the beginning of the commercial fishing industry which was a major component of Gig Harbor's economy through the 1950s.