The Great Lake-to-Sound Canal Dream
A century-old proposal to drain swampy lands and connect the Seattle lakes to the Puget Sound, fueled by fears of devastating floods and the need for new shipping channels.
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 establishment of direct communication between the waters of Lake Washington and the Sound has been agitated for the past two years. It was first proposed to carry out the project by means of canals across the stage between Lakes Washington and Union and from the latter into Salmon Bay. The cost of this undertaking was estimated at $150,000. If obtained, the drainage of large tracts of swampy lands contiguous to the lakes would be effected, and the partial protection of White River valley from the destructive floods that usually sweep over it, several times during the winter, would be warranted. The fact is established by survey that the mid-summer level of the large lake is eleven feet higher than that of the little one, and the latter again eleven feet higher still than the waters of the Sound at average high tide. In times of flood, the enormous overflow of Lake Washington through Black River, together with the torrents of Cedar and White rivers gorging at the junction where the Duwamish is formed, causes a serious inundation of the lowlands of the Mox-li-Push and the greater part of all the connecting valleys. If the lakes were lowered so that the freshets of the Cedar River, as also much of the surplus water of the White River, could pass off down the lake, this periodical inconvenience could at least be prevented. Besides, the greater part of the turbid flood waters of White River break over the banks and find their way down to the foot of the lake by the Black slough. This improvement would afford an outlet for most of the troublesome sediment that is clogging our harbor. If there were a broad ship canal into the lakes, in the event of a great commerce centering here, a portion of the lake shore would make a splendid addition to our water-front facilities.
“If we wait for some benign Hercules to step down from the Olympian heights of power to put his shoulders under our mired wheels, we may wait long.”
The project described—the Lake Washington Ship Canal—would not be fully realized until 1917, decades after this 1876 editorial. The tension between managing seasonal flood waters and the city's need for industrial infrastructure remains a central theme in modern Seattle urban planning and environmental stewardship.
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