The Dredge That Would Carve Seattle's Ship Canal
In 1895, Eugene Semple's Seattle & Lake Washington Waterway Company signed the largest dredging contract ever awarded in America — 35 million cubic yards of tide-flat muck, at 18 cents a yard, to cut a canal from Puget Sound to Lake Washington.
Active operations on the South canal will begin on or about July 10. The contract for the excavation and dredging work was let yesterday to the Bowers Dredging Company, being signed by President Eugene Semple for the Seattle & Lake Washington Waterway Company, and by C. H. Prescott for the Bowers Dredging Company. It provides for the completion of the work in five years, the dredging company to receive 18 cents per cubic yard for the earth placed in position. The dredging company furnished a suitable bond.
The dredger now undergoing repairs at Moran Bros. will begin the operations, and in a short time will be joined by the other big dredger now being boxed up at Astoria, on the Columbia. It is thought another dredger will be built before many months, and the work of excavating the canal and filling in the flats pushed to an early completion.
The contract calls for the excavating of 35,000,000 cubic yards of earth, 9,000,000 to be taken from waterways through Seattle tide land and 26,000,000 yards from a three-mile canal connecting Puget Sound and Lake Washington, the earth to be used in filling in 2,000 acres of tide lands. The price is 18 cents per cubic yard — the price named in the Seattle company's contract with the state — and the dredging company is to put in the bulkheads. It will take five years to do the work with two Bowers hydraulic suction dredgers built under patents owned by Alonzo B. Bowers, of San Francisco. It is the largest dredging contract ever awarded one company in this country. The canal company will make its profit by selling the improved land at 15 per cent advance over the cost of the improvement, by canal tolls and a $500,000 subsidy raised by Seattle.
“It is the largest dredging contract ever awarded one company in this country.”
Semple's canal was never finished as he envisioned it — the state eventually built the Lake Washington Ship Canal along a different route, and the tide flats he meant to fill became today's SoDo and the Port of Seattle. The fight over who owns the tide lands, who profits from the fill, and who pays for the waterway is the same argument Seattle still has every time a new waterfront or port project is proposed.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.