The Great Fill: Seattle’s First Major Land Reclamation and the Fight for White Labor
In October 1876, workers are frantically raising Front Street to save it from the Duwamish River. The local press frames this massive public works project not just as engineering, but as a moral victory for 'white labor' over cheap Chinese competition.
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 work of filling in Front Street is now being pushed forward vigorously with new energy, aiming to complete the grade before winter rains arrive. The proposed plan runs along Seneca Street through under First Avenue, despite protestations from different residents regarding the order of the work. It will remain an open question whether the first part will be carried out or not.
This entire work is being pushed forward vigorously with new energy to complete the grade if possible before winter rains come. It is stated that if the present weather remains good, the work will be increased week at a time for some blocks of buildings left west of 3rd Avenue. Some of these spots have been raised up ten feet or so. The work of raising the first house on the corner of Columbia Street was commenced yesterday.
The grading of Front Street will complete one of the great and most permanent public improvements that has ever been inaugurated in Seattle, and it is one that every citizen can appreciate, and that will be of immense benefit to the entire city. There is one fact in connection with it which we can only appreciate, and that is while labor has been employed to do the work. The difference to the entire city, in a business point of view, is considerable between paying out over here, a large portion of which would have found its way to the pockets of the Chinese companies who hold them, and the remainder would have been sent to China for the necessities of life, while the white laborers distribute their monies mostly about the city.
Mr. Val Willman, who has been confined in the county jail for the past fifty days in lieu of a fine, upon him at the last session of the District court, for running a licensed lottery, was released last evening, having liquidated the fine of $100 by a term of fifty days imprisonment, and also paying the costs on the suit in cash. Willman says that he did not object to the payment of the costs on the suit when his lottery was declared illegal, but he protests against the additional fine of alcohol being assessed as unjust.
We find that the last heavy rain had the effect of causing considerable amounts of mud into the fillings on Front Street where the work is at present. Not a little relief may be felt over taxing in the winter to places along the cribbing of the workmen are actively packed to withstand the drivings of the rainy season. An considerable amount of earth has also been washed down in the gullies on the up hill of streets that intersect with Front, where cuttings have been made, to the detriment of dwellers in the domicils below the level.
The blind saws that have been put in do not serve the purpose of providing against such heavy torrents though they may be adequate for ordinary drainage.
This 1876 account captures Seattle’s earliest and most defining urban struggle: the battle against its own geography. The 'filling' of Front Street (now part of the waterfront) was a desperate, expensive engineering feat to create buildable land from the mudflats of the Duwamish River. The article’s explicit framing of this labor as a victory for 'white labor' over Chinese workers highlights how early infrastructure projects were deeply entangled with the racial exclusionary policies that shaped the city's economic history.
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