Colonial Despatches

Drayton Harbor is located just south of the Canada-US border in Washington state, and feeds into Semiahmoo Bay; it is nearly closed off entirely by Semiahmoo Spit. Spanish Lieutentant Narvaez, while on Francisco de Eliza’s expedition, named it Puerto de San Jose in 1791.1

In 1841, and during a US expedition to the region, Wilkes named it after Josepeh Drayton, a ship’s artist under Wilkes’s former command.2

• 1. Robert Hitchman, Place Names of Washington (Tacoma: Washington State Historical Society, 1985), 74.
• 2. Ibid.