The Regrades and Canals

Click on the highlighted words below to see images of the Klondike Gold Rush. Many of these pictures come from the fabulousdigital collections at the University of Washington.

When Reginald Thomson first came to Seattle, he said the place was like a pit. The seven hills of Seattle, which surrounded downtown made you feel, he thought, like you were down in a pit. He also noticed that the streetcars in Seattle had a hard time getting over the hills that took day-trippers to the shores of Lake Washington. He also noticed that merchants in downtown Seattle were likely to attract a lot less business if people had to climb up a steep hill to get to their business.

All of which led to his plan to "regrade" the streets of Seattle. "Grade" is the steepness of a hill. If the grade of a hill is too great, it is too steep. Mr. Thomson and the city fathers of Seattle believed that the lower the grade of its hills, the better the business of Seattle would be. So, they proceeded to get rid of some of those hills.

Over the course of many years, workers in Seattle would get rid of three major hills, dumping the dirt from those hills along the shoreline of Seattle (helping to get rid of the problem of a very muddy and inhospitable coastline) and in Lake Union (when they couldn't think of anywhere else to put the stuff!). Life went on in Seattle, even though it took over 30 years for all these regrades to be finished.

They used several methods to get rid of the dirt. They used horses, pulling wagons to move the dirt. They used trains, running on move-able tracks. They used steam-engines to shovel up the dirt and dump it into those wagons or train cars. They also used high-pressure hoses to spray away the dirt. And, they used self-dumping barges to dump the dirt in the middle of Lake Union, where it wouldn't bother anyone. Sometimes, people who owned houses on top of these disappearing hills were able to move them before the hills disappeared. Sometimes, they were not so lucky. Sometimes, people waited too long to move their houses and they were left stranded on the tops of tiny remnants of hill.

In addition to moving dirt to flatten Seattle, the city fathers were interested in connecting Lake Washington to Lake Union and Lake Union to Puget Sound. They tried for years to do it themselves but discovered the job was too much for a small city of ditch-diggers. The Federal Government finally agreed to help in 1910 when they discovered a need to store their warships in fresh-water.

The construction of the canal that would connect Lake Washington to Lake Union to Puget Sound took six years and a lot of planning. A locks had to be constructed to keep the salt water out of the lakes. Bridges had to be constructed to keep the Southern part of the city connected with its Northern citizens. And, the flow of big Lake Washington had to be controlled into smaller Lake Union.

In the end, the geography of Seattle was much changed. Logs and coal could be moved more easily through the Montlake Cut and the Locks from West of Lake Washington to Puget Sound. Boats of all kinds now had access to the ocean. Merchants stores were more easily accessible. People could walk the streets of Seattle without breathing too hard and horses could pull streetcars to Lake Madison without required the assistance of the occupants of the streetcars. And, Seattle could build roads and shops and The Seattle Aquarium (and the Viaduct) on the dirt and stones that had come from three of Seattle's famed Seven Hill. (The Seattle Municipal Archives have a great series of photographs you can page through.)

Today, there are many repercussions of the changes Seattle-ites made to their city. One of these can be demonstrated by the effect an earthquake might have on all the landfill along the shoreline. The WA State Department of Transportation made a video simulation to demonstrate what might happen to that landfill and the viaduct and buildings on top of it if a really big earthquake were to hit Seattle.