The Waterfront Dispute
Federal land officials deny a developer’s attempt to claim prime Elliott Bay real estate through an old land scrip filing.
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.
An important decision by the register and receiver of the local land office was rendered yesterday when they for the second time refused to allow A. A. Hosmer to file Porterfield scrip on an extremely valuable strip of land along the shore of Elliott Bay, in the very heart of the city. This land is described as starting from a point in lot 8, block L, in Terry's Third addition, near the corner of Front and Marion streets—in the block covered by the Colman building—and extending northwesterly, widening until it reaches block D of Denny's Fourth addition, near the Arlington hotel. The strip is covered with buildings, docks, and warehouses worth many thousands of dollars. The land office ruled that because the land is below the line of high-water mark, it belongs to the future state and cannot be claimed by federal scrip, noting further that the land remains unsurveyed and therefore ineligible for such filings.
“Meander lines are run in surveying fractional portions of the public land bordering upon navigable rivers, not as boundaries of the tracts, but for the purpose of defining the sinuosities of the banks of the stream.”
This 1892 dispute over who owns the 'tidelands'—the ground between high and low tide—defined the early physical layout of downtown Seattle. Today, the Colman Building still stands as a landmark, and the legal battles over state versus private ownership of Seattle’s urban waterfront remain a cornerstone of local property law.
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