Maritime Heritage Center

The Maritime Heritage Center at 703 R Avenue is run by the City of Anacortes Museum and sits on the waterfront beside the old Great Northern depot near Cap Sante. Its centerpiece is the W.T. Preston, a 163 foot sternwheel snagboat built in 1939 at Lake Union Drydock in Seattle, the last sternwheeler to work Puget Sound and one of only two snagboats left in the lower 48.

For more than four decades the Preston pulled log jams and debris out of the rivers that feed the Sound, working from Blaine to Olympia and Shelton for the Army Corps of Engineers. She was retired in 1981, handed to Anacortes in 1983 and named a National Historic Landmark in 1989; today she rests in a permanent dry berth you can board and tour.

The center's own galleries rotate. Current exhibits include a Boys in the Boat display on Don Hume, the Anacortes High School class of 1933 rower at the center of that story, along with Funk fishing photographs, Anacortes Yacht Club history and the Flounder Bay Boat Company. Open Thursday through Sunday, 11 to 4; the center is free and the Preston tour charges admission. Group tours by appointment.