Turning Stumps into a City: Seattle's Great Transformation
For a quarter-century, the residents of Seattle have been waging a slow, expensive war against the forest, clearing timber, leveling hills, and filling ravines to make way for a modern city.
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.
In no way is the townsite of Seattle changing more rapidly and agreeably than in the cleaning up of lots, streets, and alleys. This was once a very rough site, with steep hills, ravines, marshes, and heavy timber. By the gradual work of a quarter-century, this has been greatly changed. First, the heavy timber disappeared, and next began the great filling-in we have seen east of Commercial street. Following that came the grading of streets and lots on the sidehills—not yet, however, more than half accomplished.
All this left a vast deal to do, and it is being done little by little every week. The hardest part of all is getting rid of stumps, and that it is being accomplished it is only necessary to take a stroll through the back streets to see. A stranger cannot, from the appearance of the business quarter now, perceive that timber ever stood there before, and it is hard to realize that during the last dozen or fifteen years, hundreds of piles and sawlogs and over ten thousand cords of wood have been removed from the lots now occupied by the hundreds of houses that make this an attractive little city.
Still, rapid as has been the work of clearing and leveling the townsite, there has at no time been so marked a change as now. Scores of men can be found rolling logs, slashing and piling brush, and digging stumps in the environs of the town, getting ready for building and gardens. It is a mighty work cleaning up a small piece of ground in this country, and slow and expensive, and it is not surprising so little has been done in this way in the past. The next year, though, will probably witness as great a change in this matter right here as the first ten years did, and the next five years as great a change as the first thirty.
“It is a mighty work cleaning up a small piece of ground in this country, and slow and expensive.”
This 1882 report on the labor-intensive 'stumping' of Seattle captures the foundational era of the city's topography. Today, while the stumps are long gone, Seattle remains a city defined by continuous, disruptive, and expensive efforts to reshape its landscape, from the massive regrading projects of the early 20th century to the constant cycle of demolition and high-density development.
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