HORACE JOHN CARROLL, known as Jack, was a developer whose donation of land to Jefferson County resulted in $300,000 to build sports fields at the Chimacum park that bears his name.
Born in 1911 in Seattle, Jack was six months old when his family moved to Port Ludlow on the Olympic Peninsula, where his family had ties — his mother, Alice Jane Harrison Carroll, was the granddaughter of Joseph Priest, who founded the city of Sequim, Carroll said in an oral history recorded for the Jefferson County Historical Society.
As a boy, Jack sold newspapers to people arriving on the Port Ludlow ferry, and by the age of 10, he had a job stamping lumber at the Port Ludlow mill for 7 cents an hour.
When the mill closed, the family moved to Port Townsend, where Jack bought his first piece of land in Glen Cove with the help of his father, John Carroll, an undertaker and at one time Jefferson County sheriff.
Jack, who was dyslexic, graduated from Port Townsend High School in 1931, attended business school in Seattle, then worked at the paper mill until 1938, when he went into real estate full time.
In 1947, he formed a company, Olympic Ferries, with Capt. Oscar Lee, and built the Quincy Street ferry dock, mortgaging his home to buy a small ferry, Fox Island, for the Keystone run.
As a developer, Carroll helped 1,600 people buy homes that couldn’t otherwise afford them, he told Marjorie Rogers, who conducted the oral history interview.
Jack Carroll lived long enough to see the baseball diamond and soccer fields his donation built dedicated in memory of Tom Yarr, a Chimacum resident who played football at the University of Notre Dame under Knute Rockne.
Carroll died in 2002 at the age of 91.
