Taming the Snohomish River
After six years of washed-out roads and frantic land acquisition, Snohomish County finally takes a permanent stand against the river's erosion.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The Snohomish river is being piled from this city to East Everett, a distance of eight miles. The piles are driven into the south shore at intervals of about eight feet and then planked in the shape of a levee. This is to protect the Snohomish-Everett road from being washed out by the abundant freshets of the fall and winter season and was recently ordered by the county commissioners at a considerable expense. This road has been the subject of complaint for the last six years. Every year the high water would wash out parts of the highway, inconveniencing farmers who live along it, until the commissioners would buy more land from the adjoining settlers, move their fences, and thus make the road passable until the next freshet. This process has been repeated time and again up to the present. A few months ago, the commissioners conceived a new idea and purchased a piledriver, to be the property of the county. This they are using in the work now in progress. Over almost the entire distance the river flows strongly against the south bank, which borders on the grand marsh and is therefore very light soil and easily scooped out by the current. The new levee is a source of much gratification to a hundred of the most well-to-do farmers of this county.
“Every year the high water would wash out parts of the highway, inconveniencing farmers who live along it, until the commissioners would buy more land from the adjoining settlers.”
Managing flood-prone riverbanks remains a persistent civic struggle in Snohomish County. While the county now relies on complex environmental permitting rather than simple piledrivers, the tension between maintaining essential transportation routes and the natural movement of the river continues to define the landscape of the Snohomish Valley.
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