If you want to drive to Port Townsend, Washington, you can. Head northwest out of Tacoma across the Narrows Bridge and up past Gig Harbor and Port Orchard along a series of state highways that wind through rural countryside and deep forests of spruce and fir. When you get to the northeasternmost point on the Olympic Peninsula, you're there.

A better way to approach Port Townsend, however, is to drive your car into the belly of the big Washington State ferry that crosses Puget Sound from Whidbey Island several times each day. Arriving by water gives you a distinct sense of Port Townsend's place in both space and time.

As the ferry churns across the sound, all you see at first is a hazy shoreline with the snow-frosted crest of the Olympic Range sparkling beyond. Then downtown Port Townsend emerges: a cluster of solid 19th-century stone, brick and cast-iron buildings crowded onto a narrow shelf of land between the harbor and a high bluff.

If you're coming to Port Townsend to unwind, the slow progress of the big ferry across the choppy water helps you get down to speed for a leisurely interlude in this laid-back village. It's not that there's nothing to do in Port Townsend. You can browse through the shops and galleries along Water Street; attend a jazz workshop or a writers' conference at old Fort Worden, now a state park and cultural center; and dine casually but well on juicy Hood Canal oysters and other local specialties at the Landfall, the Water Street Deli, or the Fountain Cafe.

But Port Townsend's most distinctive asset is its born-again Victorians--beautifully renovated nineteenth-century homes that architectural historians consider the best collection north of San Francisco.

The Starrett house, one of the most remarkable examples of Victorian residential architecture in Port Townsend (or anywhere else) was built in 1889 by a prosperous sawmill owner as an anniversary present for his wife. The massive, highly ornamented architectural style that we know today as late Victorian was in full flower, and the house that George Starrett built is a quintessential example. It has two stories of spacious rooms with 13-foot ceilings and door moldings carved with lions and doves; an abundance of tall windows and gables adorned with jigsawed sunrises and scrolls; and a great octagonal tower with a floating staircase and a frescoed ceiling that depicts the four seasons as female figures. Local legend says that Winter's scantily clad charms scandalized some of the town's respectable ladies so severely that they refused to enter the house.

When the Starrett house was built a century ago, Port Townsend's future seemed secure. Founded in 1851, six months before Seattle, the community started out as a farming and logging town. Then the federal government moved the headquarters of its northwest customs district there, and soon Port Townsend's harbor was the second busiest in the United States, topped only by New York.

When local businessmen started building a railroad to meet the transcontinental Union Pacific line, the town boomed spectacularly. It soon had a saloon on every corner, a livery stable in every block, six banks, three streetcar lines, and a telephone company. Real estate speculation ran wild--in one frantic day in 1889, $250,000 worth of property changed hands.

An imposing customs house, substantial commercial buildings, and a collection of raucous bars and brothels stood shoulder-to-shoulder in the two-block-wide downtown district. Atop the bluff to the west was a more respectable neighborhood known as uptown--a fast-growing residential area of exuberant architectural creations such as the Starrett house, Captain R.W. DeLion's Italianate villa, and a Teutonic castle built by the town's first mayor, Charles Eisenbeis.

Port Townsend's visions of glory vanished when the national depression of 1893 bankrupted the railroad and many of the town's business leaders who had built the uptown mansions. By the 1920s it was a virtual ghost town. During the war years of the '40s, some of the old Victorians were partitioned into apartments for the families of soldiers stationed at Fort Worden, but after the fort closed in the 1950s, most stood empty.

One day in 1962, George and Lorraine Nichols dropped anchor at Port Townsend on a boating vacation. "We walked up the hill and saw this astounding house," Lorraine Nichols recalls. "Then we met the young man who owned it, and he said he'd give us the key if we'd like to go inside. He had bought it with the intention of restoring it, but he had given up after tearing out the false walls. The house was unlivable, but we were fascinated by it. I can't tell you now why we did it, but we made a deal. We paid him $2000 and took on a $7000 mortgage, so we got the Starrett house for $9000."

The Nichols' impulsive acquisition marked the beginning of a Victorian renaissance in Port Townsend. They moved into the Starrett house with their four children and started renovating one room at a time, doing most of the work themselves and financing paint and wallpaper with 50-cent house tours.

About that same time, a dentist from Tacoma renovated the Bartlett house, another 1880s Victorian, and the State of Washington acquired the 1868 Rothschild house as a museum. Barbara and Lowell Bogart passed through Port Townsend on vacation in 1966 and ended up making a down payment on the James house, an 1891 Queen Anne mansion that had been chopped up into apartments. They moved in, went to work and in 1973 opened it as the Pacific Northwest's first bed-and-breakfast inn. Others followed--the current roster of Port Townsend's Victorian B&B's includes the Starrett House Inn, the James House, Lizzie's--the Lizzie G. Grant house, built in 1887--and others.

James Niebauer's 1984 illustrated guidebook, Port Townsend's Victorian Homes, describes 39 of the most outstanding ones, and many others are equally interesting. Twice a year, tours take visitors into many historic private homes that are not usually open to the public.

For a long, long time, Port Townsend appeared to be a total failure--a boom town that had busted and eventually would fade away completely. But what was bad for the local economy turned out to be very good for historic preservation--nobody could turn a profit by putting up new buildings, so there was no reason to tear down the old ones.

As a result, Port Townsend is thriving today as custodian of a priceless treasury of born-again Victorians and host to visitors who come from all over the world to see them.

Getting There: To reach Port Townsend by ferry, drive north from Seattle to Mukilteo and catch the Washington State Ferry to Clinton, at the south end of Whidbey Island. Then take the short and pleasant drive up the island to Keystone and catch another ferry that crosses Puget Sound to Port Townsend. In the summer, the Mukilteo-Clinton ferries leave on the 20-minute crossing every half-hour; the Keystone-Port Townsend ferry sails every hour-and-a-half and takes 30 minutes to cross the sound. Allow 3 to 4 hours for the whole trip. You can pick up a sailing schedule for all Washington State ferries at any ferry terminal or at the tourist information booth in the Seattle-Tacoma Airport terminal or get one by mail from Washington State Ferries, Colman Dock, Seattle, Washington 98104, (206) 464-6400.

Victorian B&Bs: Starrett House Inn, 744 Clay Street, Port Townsend, Washington 98368, (206) 385-3205. The James House, 1238 Washington Street, Port Townsend, Washington 98368, (206) 385-1238. Lizzie's, 731 Pierce Street, Port Townsend, Washington 98368, (206) 385-4168.

Historic Home Tours: First weekend in May and third weekend in September.

More Information: Port Townsend Chamber of Commerce, 2437 Sims Way, Port Townsend, Washington 98368, (206) 385-2722.

Henry Lansford is a freelance writer/photographer based in Boulder.

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