Archive
A small pond with a long memory
Park Lake sits in Wollochet Heights, on the Gig Harbor Peninsula, in the rain-fed lowlands above Wollochet Bay. The water is older than the lots. The paperwork is not.
This page is a historical file, not a brochure. It names what can be named from public records and from the owners’ own account of the pond — and it leaves blanks where a scan is still needed. When a deed, plat, or photograph arrives, the timeline should get more precise, not more lyrical.
Before the plat
A Puget Lowland wetland
The Gig Harbor Peninsula is a glacial landscape: till, outwash, seeps, and kettles left as the Vashon ice withdrew. Small ponds and forested wetlands are ordinary here, even when a subdivision later draws a line around one and gives it a name. Park Lake is that kind of water — a still basin in the woods, not a reservoir and not a park with a beach. The cedars, alders, and skunk cabbage are the older occupants.
Harbor & peninsula
Gig Harbor grows south toward Wollochet
Gig Harbor began as a fishing and boatbuilding harbor on the peninsula west of the Tacoma Narrows. Through the mid-twentieth century, residential plats filled the wooded uplands above Wollochet Bay. The bay itself — a long, sheltered arm of Hale Passage — remains the neighborhood’s larger water. Park Lake is the smaller, inland sibling: private, forested, and easy to miss from the arterial roads.
The thirteen
Park Lake held as joint tenants
The lake itself is held by thirteen co-owners as joint tenants: an undivided interest in the whole, not thirteen sliced ponds.
The living pond
Kingfishers, beavers, and a working wetland
While plats were recorded, the pond kept doing wetland work. Beaver have used it. Kingfishers still hunt it. Chorus frogs sing it open in March. A great blue heron still stands in the shallows as if the subdivision had never arrived. The historical record of Park Lake is therefore two braided stories: instruments at the Pierce County Auditor, and field notes from people who actually walk the shore.
Today
An archive maintained by one Park Lake co-owner for the voluntary benefit of other Park Lake owners
parklakeowners.org is the current chapter: a public-facing shelf for news, documents, maps, and memory, ready to live on the Park Lake Owners domain. It is not a substitute for recorded title or for a lawyer. It is the place the thirteen can point to when someone asks what this pond is, who holds it, and what has been decided.
What this archive can prove
Pierce County plat and parcel tools, the location of the pond on current aerial imagery, and the owners’ own statement that the lake is held by thirteen joint tenants.
What still needs to be brought in
Recorded deeds and any joint-tenancy instrument, the original plat sheets, easements and tracts that touch the water, shoreline or wetland reports, and photographs dated by year. Those papers turn a neighborhood story into a documented one.
How to contribute a memory
Send a scan or a dated photograph to [email protected] with the year, the shore you were standing on, and whether the file may be posted. Captions should be plain and specific. Guessing is worse than a gap.
Related files live on Documents and the legal structure on Ownership.