The Canal That Was Going to Bring the Farm Into Seattle

One of the most important effects of the construction of the Lake Washington ship canal will be to bring the country tributary to the city on easy terms, so that the cost of transporting products to market in Seattle will be reduced to a minimum. As far as the shores of Lake Sammamish the products of the farm and forest can be loaded on steamers and barges and brought right to the heart of the city without transfer. These advantages will extend over a wide area around the city and will not be confined to the city itself.

The country tributary to the lake is of considerable extent. It is rich in promise, but at present difficult of access, with several transfers involving some expense necessary to get farm products to market. At present a farmer who has a place back of Houghton, or any place on the east side of the lake, has to haul his garden truck, farm products and dairy output to the lakeshore and then it is loaded on a steamer and brought to the Madison Street terminal. There it is unloaded on the dock and then loaded again on a freight car and taken to the water front of the city, where it is once more handled, and the farmer then seeks a market. Having been sold, the product is again carted to the commission man who makes the first purchase. The building of the canal will obviate all these transfers and be the means of immeasurably developing the large farming industries of that vicinity.

It will permit the farmer to load his products on the steamer, or to bring over team and all if he so desires, and he is then brought across the lake, through the canal and down to the water front in the heart of the city, where the steamer can tie up immediately opposite the commission houses of West Street. He can leave his products on the wharf until he has visited the commission men and had a chance to sell his goods at a profit, necessitating at most a cartage of not over a block or so in delivering the goods. It thus requires no great stretch of the imagination to discern the difference the construction of the canal will make in favor of the farmer.

With the building of the canal will come, as a natural consequence, the widening and deepening of Squak Slough, which can be done at no great expense, and thus Lake Sammamish will be open to steamers and will give Seattle three distinct harbors. The logging camps along Sammamish will be enabled to dump logs in the lake, where they will be made into rafts, and steamers will tow them out of the lake, through Squak Slough into Washington, thence through the canal into the Sound to the mills along the water front, and the lumber thus made will be shipped to all parts of the world. At present the timber from that back country is hauled by rail to the Puget mills in the shape of logs, or is used into lumber at the mills and thence shipped by rail. With water transportation the whole distance the cost of producing lumber from the section in question will be greatly reduced.

It will be possible to load coal on board ship with much greater economy, for warships, steamers and colliers will be able to take their cargoes almost from the pit mouth at Newcastle, and instead of the present twenty-four mile haul by the Columbia & Puget Sound Railroad from the mines to the bunkers at the foot of King Street, there will only be a haul of two and a half miles to the lake front at Newcastle landing, where they can take their cargoes and go out through the lake and the canal. When the Newcastle mines were first opened the coal was hauled to bunkers at Newcastle landing, whence it was ferried up the lake to the portage between Lakes Washington and Union. There it was hauled up a narrow-gauge road by gravity to the summit of the isthmus and down the other side along the shore of Lake Union and down Pike Street to bunkers at the foot of that street, where it was loaded on ocean ships. This primitive method of transportation proved inferior to an all-rail haul when the Columbia & Puget Sound Railroad was completed from Seattle to the mines. The completion of the canal will probably make the cost of producing and loading coal on board ship at Newcastle as low as at the Nanaimo mines in British Columbia, which are now the terror of the trade. Thus the canal will place the largest producing coal mine of King County in a position to fully compete with its great rivals on the British side.