The Internet
There's not a lot of great information about Bremerton's history on the internet. I've done the usual poking around. If I have a specific event and it was notable enough, HistoryLink might have a page about it. The wikipedia pages are scant.
Newspapers
A kind librarian gave me the rundown early on for the newspapers.
- If you are looking for the really early days, you have to look at the South Kitsap or North Kitsap Newspaper archives. You can also try the Seattle Times.
- Once Bremerton is established, We get the Bremerton Searchlight. There is a period of time where the Searchlight operates side by side with the competetitor who will eventually supplant it- The Bremerton Sun.
- 2026 is a difficult year to operate a print newspaper. I am sad to say that The Sun has suffered the same fate as many local papers. It is a ghost of it's former self. As a child, I lived behind the Sun newspaper building and used to witness the hustle and bustle of the newspaper first hand. I knew the lovely ladies who worked there and one even walked me home from the bus stop. We took school field trips to the building, where we witnessed the giant newspresses at work. My first thoughts about what I might be when I grew up circled around it. I turned into a little Harriet the Spy, writing paragraphs in my journal about what I saw happening around town. I don't have it in my heart to hate the paper like some do. I often find my self in it's archives, reliving the glory days of The Sun.
- A limited, text based archive of the Kitsap Sun used to be available for free but it's no longer browse-able the way it used to be. Sometimes specific articles will come up in the google search but it's unreliable. I have a lot of dead bookmarks to that archive. There is a large scanned archive behind a paywall on Newspapers.com but it is incomplete. If I need something pre-1937, I find myself at the Sylvan Way library, on the microfiche. They have the full archive and even an interesting cabinet where you can attempt to search by topic.
IRL
The Kitsap Regional Library and Kitsap History Museum are awesome resources that I love to engage with now in 2026. The Librarians are wonderful people for being willing to set me up at the microfiche and showing me how to use their databases to read historical articles and educational papers. The volunteers at the History museum are always willing to entertain my strange antics, like submitting research requests about the word Bremelo. haha. Please check out these organizations, give them your time love and money if you are able.
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