National Park Service, Historic Resources Study, Ebey's Landing National Historical Reserve (2005)

Quotes, from the WPA’s Told by the Pioneers vol. 2, pp. 153-154 (1938), a letter written in January 1854 from Penn Cove, Whidbey Island, by “E. Holbrook,” brother of Capt. Richard B. Holbrook, to his mother in Massachusetts: he and his brother “have a good comfortable log cabin to live in”; “letters are brought down by private conveyance”; there were “31 vessels running between here and San Francisco”; and “the best soil I have seen is on [Whidbey] Island.” The full letter in Told by the Pioneers has not been read.