A High School on Lake Washington? Superintendent Pitches a Boating-and-Baseball Campus
As the school board haggled over an Eighth Street lot, Superintendent Barnard imagined a lakeside campus with running tracks, a gymnasium and machine shops — three blocks for the price of one.
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.
Superintendent Barnard, of the city schools, suggests the shore of Lake Washington as a better location for a high school than any yet proposed. He said yesterday:
'The distance is really no fatal objection, because many of the scholars who attend the high school, wherever it may be located, will pay car fare, and I believe that the location of the institution at the lake has so many advantages that the time consumed in going out and in would be more than compensated for. Out there we could get three blocks for the price of one close in town. This amount of room would give place for running tracks, a baseball ground, and a gymnasium; we could have the advantages of boating; we could have our industrial school and machine shops away, so that the noise of the workmen would not disturb the other scholars; our grounds would be made so beautiful that they in themselves would prove an inspiration to the pupils. These and many other advantages present themselves and I for one am heartily in favor of the idea.'
Meanwhile the school board is negotiating with Mrs. Snyder, of Snoqualmie, for the purchase of the west half of the block between Madison and Spring streets, facing on Eighth, for $25,000. The proposition will be submitted to the people as soon as an option has been secured.
“Out there we could get three blocks for the price of one close in town.”
In 1892 Seattle argued over whether to chase cheap land and elbow room out by Lake Washington or keep its high school close in town — the same central-site-versus-spacious-campus fight that animates school-bond campaigns today. A quarter-century before the Lake Washington Ship Canal, the lake felt like the far edge of the city.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.