News Release

San Juan Island NHP American Camp Visitor Center Installs Public Art and Announces Winter Hours

Kaiser Wil-Ham is the focal point of the outdoor interpretive plaza

News Release Date: October 7, 2022

Contact: Cyrus Forman, 360-298-4698

Friday Harbor, WA – On Thursday, September 22, 2022, San Juan Island National Historical Park unveiled two key elements of its new American Camp Visitor Center. The visitor center opened to the public on June 24, 2022. This brand-new facility which explores 10,000 years of island history was created in direct collaboration with six park-affiliated Coast Salish Tribes, artists, artisans, and local historians. However, our park had to wait a little bit longer for two major parts of the visitor experience to be finished: a life-size bronze statue of a Berkshire boar and a bronze orientation map depicting the maritime Coast Salish world.

This lifelike statue, created by Washington State based sculptor Robert MacDonald, of Mach 2 Arts, a WA-State based firm, depicts a pig with a potato in its mouth.  The park held a contest to name the pig and naming suggestions were solicited from the public. A vote was held on social media; 135 votes were cast and the overwhelmingly favorite name was Kaiser Wil-ham. The pig itself represents the animal at the center of The Pig War, whose theft of potatoes from an American farmer led to an armed standoff between the American and British empires on San Juan Island in the summer of 1859. Its name refers to Kaiser Wilhelm, the first emperor of Germany, who held boundary arbitration hearings in 1872 that peacefully resolved the twenty-six years of international disputes in the San Juan archipelago. San Juan Islands National Historical Park was established in 1966 to commemorate the peaceful resolution of that conflict and to preserve and interpret the island’s history.

This week the park begins its autumn visitation hours at the new American Camp Visitor Center. The English Camp Visitor Center has closed for the season but the American Camp Visitor Center will be open Thursday-Saturday from 10AM-4 PM until November 19^th, with the exception of closures on October 27^th-29^th. The pig, however, is located outside of the visitor center itself and, along with numerous outdoor exhibits, will be open to the public 24 hours a day. After the end of the autumn season, the visitor center will be open to groups of visitors via a reservation process which will be announced later this month.