Master Plan for Exhibits & Interpretation at Lake Union Park

A capitalist city usually begins as a cross roads of commerce. Seattle didn’t become a cross road of anything until the railroad from the east coast came. And how Northern Pacific came to Seattle was another example of attaining an impossible dream. Northern Pacific had good reason not to choose Seattle. Why they changed their mind is a story filled with strategic tricks and gambling against all odds. Our founders would not accept anything less than a metropolis and a major railroad terminal would be an essential element.

The railway hub is only a small portion of the Lake Union story, but the determination to deal with formidable challenges exhibits the true heart of Seattle’s history.  It was 1870 and every settler in Washington Territory knew Northern Pacific had begun to lay track across the continent and that Seattle, the largest city in the Territory would be its destination. This created a land rush in Seattle and the population zoomed to 2000.

Northern Pacific took full advantage of the deal they were given for right of way in the yet unmapped west. They would be granted 23 miles on both sides of the track. Thus the Northern Pacific plan was to pick a route where they would gain the most land value. In the Northwest they chose to go wherever the primal forests were. After the rail line was finished they could return and reap the trees. As a result the rail was planned to take a wide sweep across forests west of the Cascades and end on the Columbia River, not Puget Sound.
That was bad news for Seattle, but even worse was the telegram Northern Pacific sent from Kalama, on the Columbia River, to Arthur Denny on July 14, 1873.  “We have created the terminus at Commencement Bay.” Northern Pacific would provide a spur line to Puget Sound and it would be another profit bonanza, since there was no settlement on Commencement Bay. The railroad would own a town yet to be born. A lot of Seattle folks moved south, to claim a beachhead on this city-to-be, Tacoma, and to be first in line for a job with Northern Pacific.  Tacoma began as a company town.

Mad as hell was the attitude of  the remaining Seattleites. Instead of fuming, they decided to build their own railroad to the wheat country, through Snoqualmie Pass. Within two months $500,000 was subscribed to build the Seattle and Walla Walla Railroad and Transportation Company. Volunteers began building the trackage from the water front. The story of the mouse railroad enterprise that roared hit the press from coast to coast. A lot of people with legal and management skills came to Seattle to help it outplay the bully. By early autumn of 1873 Northern Pacific completed the spur to Tacoma. Two hundred who had evacuated  Seattle were there to greet the mighty Northern Pacific.

Ironically, 1873 was the year that was also the beginning of a depression, the Panic of 1873. Northern Pacific arrived in the future Tacoma on credit and promises. The workers had not been paid and threatened to tear up the rail. Northern Pacific was dead in the water.  However, the sun shone on Seattle and the investor,  James Coleman, stepped up and funded the Seattle and Walla Line to reach the Renton coal fields. The wheat in Walla Walla would have to wait, but the coal from Renton could now keep Seattle’s tiny rail line operating.
At the same time tracks were built around Lake Union to serve the sawmills and villages. The terminal was the foot of Columbia Street and there were stops at Ballard, Ross, Fremont, Ravenna, the sawmill town of Yesler, and around the north end of Lake Washington. With the discovery of new coal fields, the Lakeshore was extended. Its east end was Issaquah, with a bridge crossing the Snoqualmie River. The Northern Pacific had recovered from the panic and out of desperation that Seattle would monopolize the coal and wheat shipping; they bought the Lakeshore and Eastern, transforming a Lake Union tinker toy operation to a major commercial transportation operation. Northern Pacific built a South Lake Union freight station on the line in 1913 between Republican and Thomas on Terry Ave.

Rail was high tech transportation in the 19th century, but in Seattle it was second in capacity to horses. Seattle was provided with a privately owned horse car system in 1884. It went on Second Ave from Seattle’s historic center to Pike Street, Seattles’ northern city edge. Two years later it was extended all the way to Lake Union. The fare was five cents each way.

David Denny’s Lake Union Lumber and Manufacturing Company took over the southwest corner of Lake Union in 1882.  The Western Mill, a big sawmill operation, mercilessly logged and sawed the primal forest surrounding the mill.  The sawdust and bark filled up the Lake where the park in now sited.  The sawmill continued through the late 1930’s.

People had heard about electric streetcars, but the City Council wouldn’t touch them with a long pole. They equated alternating current with erratic power, and feared the street cars would change direction on the whim of electrons. Public Safety was not to be compromised by this electric stuff. But, on the other hand, the city fathers heard Tacoma was considering electric streetcars, so in 1889 Seattle Electric Railway and Power Company was created. By 1890 Luther Griffith installed an electric streetcar running on a trestle along the west side of Lake Union.

Streetcars quickly became the popular way to get from neighborhood to neighborhood, town to town. It was pleasant riding because most of the routes passed through untouched natural environments. In 1892, the Leschi streetcar encountered a bear and a cougar on the tracks in one trip.
Streetcars also offered social opportunities. Conductor Adelbert W. Mudgett had a girl friend on each stop and married two of them, until they both decided to ride on Mudgett’s car at the same time. It took three policemen to get Mudgett safely off the car and into jail.

The Griffith streetcar trestle was filled in 1925 and became Westlake Ave N. The 34 electric streetcars in Seattle became obsolete in 1940. All were destroyed in Georgetown except one, #13. It is now part of the MOHAI collection.

Seattle’s Great Fire of 1889 wiped out 60 acres of the center of commerce. The core of Seattle had to be rebuilt and the city decreed it could only be brick or stone buildings. Brick factories sprung up and they required clay. The hillside tumbling to the southwest corner of Lake Union was a clay layer which was benevolently deposited by the Vashon Glacier. The hill was attacked. There are still shelves of flat land on Southwest Queen Anne hill made through the mining of clay.

The city’s downtown was beginning to look like a place that was built to last, but around the fringes it still had ramshackle wood shacks and ancient log cabins. The original 1851 Denny cabin at Alki Point was offered to the city by the Denny family. It was refused because the city was not in the preservation business. The family burned it in 1893.

Seattle was looking ahead, not behind. They hired Reginald H. Thompson as City Engineer. He put in a sewer system. At that time, the 1890’s, the population was 40,000, but Thompson designed the system to serve 400,000. He built a water pipeline for Seattle from the Cedar River and bought 80,000 acres for the river’s watershed.

Thompson sluiced Denny hill into Elliott Bay because its perpendicular sides prevented city expansion. The flat he created, known as the Denny Regrade had to wait almost 100 years before an urban skyline was added, but the Thompson vision was right on. Another vision was parks. The city he found had all the trees chopped down, leaving mud roads and splintering plank sidewalks. Thompson talked the city into acquiring 2000 acres to be made into parks and playgrounds by 1900.

The Panic of 1873 was a mere mosquito bite to our economy, compared to the Panic of 1897. Seattle was in the dumps as well as the rest of the nation until the steamer Portland arrived at Schwabacher’s wharf on July 17. It had come from the mouth of the Yukon River and it had passengers from the Klondike with boxes full of gold!
The news spread and it changed Seattle as nothing else before or since.

A few weeks before the Portland docked in Seattle, a ship landed in San Fransisco with Alaskan miners.  The press announced a “million dollars of gold” had arrived.  No one in 1897 America understood a million of anything. When the Portland docked the Seattle Chamber of Commerce hired a journalist Erastus Brainard as their press agent. Brainard titled the Portland’s arrival as bringing a “ton of gold.” Everyone knew “ton.” Because of the great marketing skills of Brainard, Seattle came to be synonymous with the front door to the Klondike. Thousands of people from all over the country wanted to rush to Alaska and get their sack full of golden nuggets. Every steamboat that floated was put into business. Many more were under construction. The ex-mayor of Seattle, Robert Moran and his brothers built twelve 75-foot stern wheel steamers to get miners to Alaska. The mayor of Seattle, Col. S. D. Wood even bought his own steamer and deserted  town to find a fortune.

A lot of folks just stayed home and got into the outfitting business. They sold clothing, tools, and some even kidnapped pet dogs and sold them as Alaskan sled dogs to the novice miners on their way north. Alaska had become a suburb of Seattle. Seattle had shaken off the depression.

The Gold Rush gave birth to Seattle’s middle class. Before was feudal governance, a small committee of land inheritors smoked cigars and sipped whiskey in the Rainier Club and decided Seattle’s future. As a result of the Gold Rush, a large constituency of business owners in outfitting and transportation industries had tipped the scale on who was in charge.
                        Dick Wagner