Baby Island Heights, Washington

Archaeological evidence, including shell middens, indicates that Baby Island and mainland Rocky Point were home to seasonal camps of the Snohomish (sduhubš) people.^[11] In 1841, Lieutenant Charles Wilkes of the United States Exploring Expedition noted the presence of a Snohomish stockade on the bluffs of Rocky Point above Baby Island, one of many such fortifications in the Salish Sea and on Whidbey Island in the mid-nineteenth century.^[5][12] Despite having been forced to relocate to the Tulalip Reservation by the 1855 Treaty of Point Elliott, Snohomish members of the Tulalip Tribes continued to visit and camp on the island until the 1920s.^[13]

Baby Island was one of four minor islands around Whidbey Island and Camano Island excluded from Island County when the Oregon Territorial Legislature created the county on January 6, 1853, an error maintained by the Washington Territorial Legislature's description of the county boundaries in 1867.^[14] This oversight in the Washington Revised Code was finally corrected in 2006 with the passage of Washington HB 2908, sponsored by Rep. Barbara Bailey.^[6][15]

In 1919, a Whidbey Island resident named Darell Scott purchased Baby Island when it was over 1 acre (0.40 ha) in size, rising 8 feet (2.4 m) out of the water, covered in wild roses and cherry trees.^[16][17] He was injured off Scotland in the 1918 torpedo attack by SM UB-77 on SS Tuscania during the First World War and chose to retire to his childhood campground on Baby Island.^[16] Throughout the 1920s, he built up the island with a fishing lodge, water tower, and cabins for tourists.^[16] Before the community of Baby Island Heights itself was platted, the area was a well-known fishing area.^[17] In 1924 Scott's Baby Island Resort officially opened to the public.^[16] The island was the site of significant bootlegging during the Prohibition era, with rum-runners seeking shelter from the U.S. Coast Guard in the vicinity of the resort.^[16][17][11] The resort attracted several well-known early-20th-century Seattle outdoorsmen to the Rocky Point area, including Eddie Bauer, who built a cabin on the mainland.^[5][17] The community of Baby Island Heights was officially platted in 1928 with only a rough road connecting it to Saratoga Road.^[16] At least two more resorts, including ones owned by Arthur Goodfellow and Jimmy Remp, were opened in the newly-platted community the following year.^[18][19][20]

During the summer of 1936, the Civilian Conservation Corps created an improved road through the dense forest to the community, greatly improving automobile access to and from Langley.^[16] A year later, Scott lost possession of the island in a poker game.^[11] The new owner constructed a bulkhead in an effort to stave off the constant erosion.^[16] The island changed hands several times in the succeeding decades and was owned by Verne Johnson by 1959.^[16]

In 1946, when public electricity was brought to the area, growth on Rocky Point started to increase. Residents stated the Baby Island Saratoga Club in 1949, focused on raising money for improvements to Saratoga Road, the local water system, and establish a fire-fighting service.^[21] Many of the present-day homes in Baby Island Heights were built between the late 1940s and the early 1970s. A campaign in the mid-1950s sought to establish a state park in the vicinity of Rocky Point.^[21] By 1959, the old resort on Baby Island proper was no longer in use, though the original structures remained until 1963, when a group of campers burned them down with an untended campfire.^[20] The island changed hands again in 1966, when the parcel containing it and some of the shore was sold to a land developer, who subdivided it.^[22] In the early 1970s, the island was struck by a heavy storm, which contributed significantly to the island's erosion and reduction in size.^[17] Resorts on the mainland remained open to the public until at least 1979. Also in 1979, the Seattle Times published a call for an ecologist to purchase and save the island from erosion.^[23]

On October 8, 1993, the Tulalip Tribes of Marysville purchased Baby Island and its surrounding tidelands and shorelands from an absentee owner residing in San Francisco for around $130,000.^[6][20]

The community of Baby Island Heights is situated at the junction of Saratoga Road and East Harbor Road. Saratoga Road connects the community to Langley and Clinton, while East Harbor Road links it to Freeland. It continues to be supported by the Baby Island Saratoga club, with present-day efforts focused on fundraising for education and public safety.^[21]

The South Whidbey Historical Society museum in Langley displayed an exhibit on the various historic fishing resorts of Baby Island in 2001.^[20] The band Baby Island, formed in 2012 by former members of The Format and LAKE, is named after the island.^[24]

In 2021, researchers at the University of Washington found Baby Island Heights to be one of several communities in Island County with racially restrictive covenants dating to the 1930s through 1950s persisting in contemporary documents. Although unenforceable since the Civil Rights Act of 1968, the discovery prompted press coverage and advocacy for their removal.^[25]