A Citizen Asks: Is the Government Canal Being Sidetracked?
A letter to the editor warns that the private company filling Seattle's tide flats may be quietly killing the Lake Union–Salmon Bay canal — and notes the government engineer is on that company's payroll.
Seattle, June 21, 1895.
To the Editor: In common with many interested citizens, the undersigned is ignorant of the present status of the north or government canal, and would like to know what progress is being made by the engineers. Has the definite location of route been made? If so, is the board of county commissioners pushing their part of the work? Presumably they are, but in view of the oft-repeated statement that those interested in the filling of the tide flats and the construction of the south canal are intending to so manipulate things as to defeat the building of the canal by way of Salmon bay and Lake Union, it is not surprising that many of our people are becoming impatient at what to them seems needless delay in getting to work on the north or government canal.
The writer of this is strongly in favor of the contemplated improvements on the tide flats, but like hundreds of others does not want to see that work go forward at the expense of the government canal. The fact that Capt. Symons, the government engineer under whose direction the work by way of Salmon bay and Lake Union is being done, has been employed by the Seattle and Lake Washington Waterway Company (a private corporation) as its supervising engineer, has given rise to no little criticism on the part of certain citizens, and which has not tended to give confidence in the ultimate success of the government canal.
There is a feeling, deep-seated and determined, that the government canal, for which the people of this city and county have so long and earnestly labored, must not be sidetracked, and that work on that great enterprise is not being pushed with that degree of energy due an enterprise of so much importance to the people of not only Seattle and King county, but of interest to the people of the entire state of Washington.
A statement from the county commissioners of the progress already made and of what may be expected in the near future, say for the year 1895, of the work in connection with the government canal, would be of interest to the voters of this county and might not be without its influence upon them at the polls in the next county election. F. R. WART.
“There is a feeling, deep-seated and determined, that the government canal... must not be sidetracked.”
The 1895 fight over the Lake Washington Ship Canal pitted public engineers against a private tide-flat company — and the suspicion that the same man served both. Today the same waterway is the Montlake Cut and the Ship Canal, and Seattle still argues over who controls the shoreline and who profits from public infrastructure.
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