Frank Nickels, (1875-1901)
Headstone GPS Coordinates:
Birth: December 1875, Seabeck, Kitsap County, Washington Territory
Death: 15 Nov 1901, Steilacoom, Pierce County, Washington
Relatives in Seabeck Cemetery: Samuel Nickels, Clara Nickels née Berry, Augusta “Gussie” Nickels, Baby Clara Nickels
American Revolutionary War Patriots*: Nathaniel Berry (Massachusetts)
DAR# A009622; Samuel Edward Berry (Massachusetts) DAR# A009627; William Nickels (Massachusetts)
Disclaimer: These lines have not been officially proven by NSDAR standards
Frank Nickels was born in December 1875 in Seabeck, Kitsap County, Washington Territory, into a pioneering family whose roots stretched from Maine to the Pacific Northwest. He was the son of Samuel and Clara Nickels, early settlers who helped shape the Seabeck community during its mill-town years.
Frank’s parents, Samuel Nickels and Clara Ella Berry, were both natives of Kennebec County, Maine. Samuel was born July 22, 1842, in Pittston to Captain Alexander and Hannah Nickels. Clara was born April 13, 1845, in Gardiner to Elbridge Berry and Angeline Carey. The couple married on March 26, 1864, in Pittston and welcomed their first child, Alice Gertrude, the following year.
By 1869, the young family had moved west to California, where their second child, Augusta “Gussie,” was born. In 1870 they settled in Seabeck, Washington Territory, where Samuel found work in the sawmill. Seabeck at that time was still a developing frontier community along Hood Canal. Alice later recalled their arrival, remembering that when they landed at the wharf she saw Native people but no white settlers and felt frightened by the unfamiliar scene.
Frank was born into this rugged mill-town environment in 1875. He grew up alongside his siblings — Alice, Gussie, Nellie, Arthur, and Samuel — in a household shaped by the rhythms of logging, milling, fishing, and farming. Census records show that in 1880 his father was employed in a sawmill. By 1887 the family was living in Port Gamble, but by 1900 they had returned to Seabeck, where Samuel worked as a fisherman and later as a farmer on his own land.
The 1900 federal census provides a snapshot of Frank at age twenty-four: single, living at home with his parents, and working as a fisherman on Puget Sound alongside his brothers Arthur and Samuel. His sister Gussie, age thirty, was also living in the household, while the eldest sister, Alice Gertrude, had married John Walton and was living nearby in Seabeck with her own family.
Behind the outward appearance of a hardworking pioneer family, however, there were struggles with mental illness. As early as April 1874, diarist Jacob Hauptly recorded that “Sam Nickels is crazy,” and noted the following day that he had “put Sam Nickels on board the Colfax (ship) for Steilacoom.” Decades later, Samuel would again be institutionalized at Western Washington State Hospital.
Soon after the 1900 census was taken, Frank himself was admitted to the Washington State Hospital for the Insane in Steilacoom (later known as Western Washington State Hospital). The specific circumstances surrounding his commitment are not detailed in surviving records, but his confinement marked a tragic turn in what had appeared to be a steady working life.
Frank died at the hospital on November 15, 1901, at just twenty-five years of age. The cause of death listed on his death notice was illegible. His passing came quietly and far from home, within the walls of the institution.
Although cemetery plot maps recorded his burial in the Seabeck Cemetery, no grave marker remains to identify his resting place. He lies among family members whose lives were also marked by hardship: Baby Clara, who died in 1874; his sister Augusta “Gussie,” who would spend decades institutionalized before her death in 1954; and his parents, Clara and Samuel, who were buried there in 1923 and 1924.
Frank Nickels’ life was brief but emblematic of many pioneer-era families in Washington Territory — resilient, hardworking, and deeply intertwined with the early industries of Puget Sound. Yet his story also reflects a quieter and more painful history: the limited understanding and treatment of mental illness at the turn of the twentieth century. Though no stone bears his name in Seabeck Cemetery, the record of his life endures in census pages, hospital registers, and the memory of the community his family helped build.