Joshua Woodhouse, (1842-1873)

Headstone GPS Coordinates: Burial location unknown

Birth: 1842, England

Death: 15 December 1873, poss. Seabeck, Kitsap County, Washington

Relatives in Seabeck Cemetery: None

American Revolutionary War Patriots*: None

Disclaimer: These lines have not been officially proven by NSDAR standards

Joshua Woodhouse’s story survives only in fragments—ink on payroll ledgers, a census entry, a historian’s notes, and an unmarked grave in the cemetery at Seabeck. He was one of many Northern European immigrants who came to Seabeck to work in the mill, drawn by steady wages and the promise of opportunity in Washington Territory.

According to the late historian Fred Just’s notes, Joshua was a White male born in England in 1842. Like many young men of his generation, he crossed the Atlantic in search of work and a future that may have seemed out of reach at home. By the late 1860s, he had settled in Seabeck, a company town built around the powerful hum of the Washington Mill.

The 1870 U.S. federal census, taken on June 22, records Joshua living in Seabeck in Thomas Stark’s household, likely renting as a boarder. At twenty-eight years old, he was employed at the Washington Mill Company, where payroll records show he worked between 1868 and 1870 at a rate of $45 per month—a good wage for a mill worker at the time. The work would have been demanding and dangerous, filled with long days, heavy timber, and the constant whine of saws shaping the vast forests of the Pacific Northwest into lumber bound for growing cities.

In 1870, Joshua became a naturalized American citizen in Jefferson County, likely in Port Townsend. It was a meaningful step. Naturalization signaled permanence—a decision to claim this rugged, expanding land as his own. He was on his way to building a good life in his adopted country.

But that life was brief. On December 15, 1873, at just thirty-one years of age, Joshua Woodhouse died from unknown causes. His passing left little trace beyond a record and a name.

He was likely among those first buried in the “old burial ground” in Seabeck that unknowingly sat right outside the designated cemetery grounds. The mistake wasn’t known until a government survey crew came through a few years later and noted the proper property boundaries of the cemetery. A few years later, when Justice of the Peace Jacob Hauptly cleared and designated the official Seabeck Cemetery grounds, eleven individuals were exhumed and reburied there. Joshua was likely one of them—moved from the rough beginnings of a frontier graveyard to the more orderly resting place that still overlooks the waters and forests he once helped to harvest.