U

Uddenberg

Axel Uddenberg was born in Stockholm, Sweden in 1855. He went to sea in 1871 and gained his master’s papers to command a merchant ship by the time he was 21. He first saw the Puget Sound in 1888, when he hauled a cargo of lumber from Tacoma to Australia. He came back to Washington to farm in 1890, first at Spanaway, then at Roy. He moved to Gig Harbor in 1906 and built a home which featured a general store on the ground floor. The house was in north Gig Harbor, at the head of the bay. W.P. Kendall already had a general store nearby, but there seemed to be room for another. It was a busy stretch, home of the post office and Frank Secor’s livery stable, which catered to farmers who brought their horse-drawn wagons down from Crescent Valley and the back country. Axel and Angelina Uddenberg had six children: Hobart, Signo, Aida, Bertram, Herman & Alice. In 1910 or 1911, Axel purchased land beside the People’s Dock from Sam Jerisich’s wife, Anna. The two-building store housed a hay and feed shop facing the waterfront, and the West Side Grocery, catering to those whoe came by land or sea. Axel chose his son Bert to run the operation. As a man who had commanded a ship at 21, he saw nothing wrong with turning the management of a store over to a 16 year old. With the onset of WWI, two of Axel’s sons went into the service. Bert, recently married, set aside his storekeeper duties to serve in the medical corps. Another son, Herman, became Gig Harbor’s lone casualty, killed in action in France just weeks before the end of the war in 1918. Sadly, this was not the last tragedy for the Uddenberg family. In 1923, Axel and Angelina lost son Signo when his ship sank in a storm at sea. BK/107-8, 117