Union, WA — Where the Canal Turns, and the Roads Meet

What Actually Makes Union Different From Every Other Hood Canal Town

Start with the shape of the water itself. Hood Canal runs roughly 50 miles southwest from its mouth near Foulweather Bluff before making a dramatic, nearly 180-degree turn -- a feature long-established local usage calls the Great Bend -- and reversing direction to run another 15 miles northeast to its shallow end at Lynch Cove, near Belfair. Union sits directly on that turn, on the canal's south shore near where the Skokomish River empties in from the Olympic Mountains. That is a structurally different position from a town strung along one straight stretch of shoreline: Union isn't a point along a line, it's the pivot itself. State Route 106 reflects that geography exactly, running through the center of town on its way from a junction with US 101 at Skokomish (south of town, the route toward Shelton and the rest of the Olympic Peninsula) to a junction with State Route 3 near Belfair (north of town, the route toward Bremerton and the broader Kitsap Peninsula). A resident of Union genuinely has two directions off the canal, not one -- a real, structural difference from a town at either linear end of Hood Canal's long shoreline.

That crossroads position isn't a modern real-estate marketing invention; it goes back to the town's own founding. Early settlers and the Twana people who lived here first knew the place by a Twana name recorded as duxWhLu'qWat3d; by the 1880s it was known simply as Union, and in 1889 -- the same year Washington achieved statehood -- lumberman, developer, and state legislator John McReavy renamed it Union City specifically to mark the occasion. McReavy was a genuinely outsized local figure: postmaster, hotel and store owner, school superintendent, a delegate to the 1889 Washington State Constitutional Convention, and later a state senator, with an openly stated ambition to turn Union into a "Venice of the Pacific." That ambition never fully materialized, but McReavy's own 1890 Victorian mansion on the bluff above town -- built for his own family, and reportedly the subject of local ghost stories -- is widely described as the oldest standing structure anywhere on Hood Canal, a tangible piece of that 19th-century boom-town history still standing today.

The other anchor of Union's identity opened in 1913, four years before that road connection fully existed: Alderbrook. Seattle businessman Henry Stumer, working with friends from Seattle's Swedish Club, began developing beachfront property just east of Union City starting in 1909, and when the resort opened in 1913 guests had no road to drive -- they arrived by boat from Union City or on horseback, staying in tent cabins with no windows, no electricity, and a nearby creek used for refrigeration. The property changed hands repeatedly over the following century -- to two women known locally as "the Alderbrook Girls" in the 1920s, then to the Schafer Logging and Lumber Company after World War II, briefly serving as a Christian conference center at one point -- before North Forty Lodging bought it in 2001 and reopened it in June 2004 as the modern Alderbrook Resort & Spa, now anchored by a 1,200-foot marina, a Northwest-cuisine restaurant, a spa, and a golf course. Few small Hood Canal communities can point to a single continuously-operating hospitality landmark spanning more than a century of the town's own history the way Union can with Alderbrook.

Union's identity is also inseparable from its neighbor: the Skokomish Indian Reservation sits immediately adjacent, at the delta where the Skokomish River meets Hood Canal, established by an 1855 treaty and home today to the Skokomish Tribe, whose people are primarily descended from the Twana, the Indigenous nation whose aboriginal territory covered the entire Hood Canal drainage. That relationship is not purely historical. Starting in the 1920s, the City of Tacoma's Cushman Dam project diverted roughly 40% of the Skokomish River's flow directly into Hood Canal, bypassing the river's natural channel for decades and contributing to serious downstream flooding and habitat loss as sediment built up in the reduced flow. After a protracted legal fight, the Skokomish Tribe secured a role in jointly managing North Fork river flows as part of a new federal operating license issued in 2010, which increased required flow releases below the dams and funded ongoing habitat restoration aimed at recovering Hood Canal's ESA-listed summer chum salmon, Puget Sound Chinook, and steelhead. A buyer in Union is, in a very real sense, living at the edge of one of the more significant ongoing tribal water-rights and salmon-restoration stories in the contemporary Pacific Northwest -- not a footnote, but a live, current fact about the place.

Finally, be honest about the water itself. Hood Canal's unusual, narrow, elbow-shaped geometry -- the same Great Bend that puts Union at its center -- limits how thoroughly its deep water mixes and flushes, especially in the warmer months, and that natural circulation pattern is the documented root cause of a real, recurring low-dissolved-oxygen problem in the canal's southern reaches, the stretch nearest Union. It produced serious enough fish kills in 2002, 2003, and 2006 that the Washington Legislature created the Hood Canal Aquatic Rehabilitation Zone in 2005 specifically to study and respond to it. This is not a reason to avoid Union -- Twanoh State Park, a few miles from town, remains genuinely popular for swimming and shellfish harvesting on the same water -- but it is a real, documented, Hood-Canal-specific water-quality fact this page treats honestly rather than glossing over, covered in full detail on the Waterway Living page.