When the Lake Washington Ship Canal was constructed in 1911-1917, people hoped that the canal would benefit Seattle’s business environment. It was difficult to foresee, however, all that might happen, and what would be the actual impact of the canal work. In the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle, Waldo B. Staples found that the new, deeper and wider canal caused problems at first, but then unexpectedly the canal created a new means of livelihood for him.
Author: Valarie
Valarie was born in Seattle and is a volunteer neighborhood history writer.
The Fremont Bridge Collapse of March 13, 1914
In 1914 work was ongoing to dig the present ship canal at Fremont. The original, narrow channel had already been made wider and had been spanned with a bridge called a trestle, meaning a flat, rigid structure supported by posts. The trestle bridge was wide enough to support streetcar rails and had a lane for the increasing number of automobiles which were being driven in Seattle. During the work of digging a much deeper and wider channel for the ship canal, the waters of Lake Union were held back by a timber dam at the northwest corner of the lake.
Continue reading “The Fremont Bridge Collapse of March 13, 1914”
Fremont and Seattle’s Ship Canal
Seattle’s earliest white settlers saw immediately that it would be possible to connect its freshwater lakes to the saltwater Puget Sound by means of a canal. At a Fourth of July picnic in 1854, Thomas Mercer proposed the name of Lake Union because that body of water was in the middle between Lake Washington to the east and Puget Sound to the west.
Seattle settlers of the 1850s Thomas Mercer and David Denny took land claims at the south end of Lake Union near today’s Seattle Center. Two single men, John Ross and William Strickler, searched out the land and in 1853-1854 they took claims at the northwest corner of Lake Union, which today is the Fremont neighborhood. It was not until 1916 that a ship canal was constructed which was large enough for industrial use. Continue reading “Fremont and Seattle’s Ship Canal”