The Great 1894 Northwest Flood
Catastrophic rising rivers submerge farmland, destroy crops, and paralyze rail lines across Washington and British Columbia.
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 flood in the Columbia continues to increase, and the indications are that the worst is yet to come. The river is more than a foot higher than ever before known. Fertile bottom lands along the river from the Rocky mountains to the sea are all inundated. Crops are ruined, houses washed away, and stock drowned. The salmon canning business has been almost annihilated. Along the Union Pacific, about twenty miles of track are under water. In the Skagit Valley, the Duwamish and Black river bottoms are all flooded. Many farms are standing seven or eight feet deep in water. At Kent, about half of Meeker's hop fields are under water. Similar devastation is reported in the Fraser Valley in British Columbia, where the Canadian Pacific track is under water for fifteen miles.
“The water is now within a foot of the top of the telegraph poles, and rising fast.”
The 1894 flood remains a benchmark for river management in the Pacific Northwest. Today, these same low-lying floodplains in the Kent and Duwamish valleys are heavily developed, raising questions about how our infrastructure would handle such historic water levels in the modern era.
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