The Unfinished Ditch That Could Have Remade Seattle
An 1877 proposal to carve a channel between Lake Washington and the Sound highlights the ambitious—and forgotten—infrastructure dreams that once defined the city’s early development.
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 water system of King County is anomalous. It presents a strange network of communicating rivers and salt water bays. A consequence of this complicated system is a retarded and incomplete discharge of the flood waters and a constant surfeit of water in the interior. The forty square miles of water surface and fabulous depth of Lake Washington, at present, has no outlet except by way of Black and Duwamish rivers into the head of the bay, a distance, considering the windings of these rivers, of over twenty miles. Scientific measurements, as well as obvious observations along the rapids of Black river, attest the fact that the summer level of this lake is not less than 15 or 20 feet above the high tide level of the Sound. Instead of such a crooked 'getting down stairs' as this, the lake might easily be made to discharge directly into the Sound by an outlet only three miles in length, by way of Shilshole Bay and Lake Union. To cut a channel across this short portage, and possibly clear out and deepen a little the outlet of Lake Union, is all that is needed to form a direct water communication with Lake Washington, drain and reclaim many thousand acres of the richest land in the country, now swampy and uncultivated, and save the farmers of the river valleys in great part from the mischief of the winter and more particularly of the summer floods. It has been estimated that $6,000 would suffice to open a ditch across the portage, sufficient for the purpose of drainage and to answer the requisite purpose of transportation for some time to come. In fact, we are informed that a responsible citizen of the county stands ready to take the contract at the figure stated.
“Instead of such a crooked 'getting down stairs' as this, the lake might easily be made to discharge directly into the Sound.”
This 1877 editorial essentially laid out the blueprint for the Lake Washington Ship Canal, which would not be completed for another 40 years. It highlights how Seattle’s early growth was perpetually defined by ambitious, expensive, and often delayed public works projects meant to conquer the region's challenging geography.
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