Olympia's Fresh-Water Harbor Dream, Before Seattle's Ship Canal
In 1892, as Northern Pacific lobbyists pushed a Lake Washington ship canal for Seattle, Olympia argued it already had a cheaper place for a sheltered fresh-water basin—between Third Street and Tumwater.
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.
FRESH WATER HARBOR.
A dispatch to the San Francisco Chronicle from Washington City says: It is already apparent that the scheme to construct a great ship canal with an elaborate system of locks from Lake Washington to Puget Sound, giving Seattle a fresh water harbor and thus eluding the corroding barnacle and destructive teredo, will have many friends in the lobby during this session of Congress. It also says that the Northern Pacific Railroad Company is greatly interested in the work and that it is a Northern Pacific project. It notes the arrival of Henry Villard at the national capital and says he came for the express purpose of seeing that the government paid for this great ship canal and constructed it as soon as possible. There is no doubt that this canal will be built one of these days, but to think that the present Congress will appropriate 1 cent toward it is giving scope to a wide stretch of imagination. Puget Sound ought to have a fresh water harbor. A capacious fresh water basin can be secured right here in Olympia between Third St. and Tumwater at far less expense than the building of the ship canal from Lake Washington to Puget Sound, and it would be entirely free from heavy wind and rain storms.
“A capacious fresh water basin can be secured right here in Olympia between Third St. and Tumwater at far less expense than the building of the ship canal from Lake Washington to Puget Sound.”
The fight over the Lake Washington Ship Canal was also a fight over which Puget Sound city would get the infrastructure—and the federal dollars—to shape its future. Olympia's alternative never happened, but the Seattle-versus-Olympia rivalry over ports, transportation and public investment still echoes in regional planning today.
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