Keyword(s): David B. Williams
Few changes to the Seattle landscape were as epic as the regrading of Denny Hill, which took place between 1897 and 1930 and involved five separate projects. Located between downtown and Queen Anne Hi...
With 534 acres of forest, meadow, and beach on a broad point projecting into Puget Sound, Discovery Park at West Point in Seattle's Magnolia neighborhood is the city's largest green space and among it...
Washington state has fossils ranging in age from 12,000 years old to more than 500 million years old. People have made use of them for thousands of years, but not until non-Native people arrived were ...
The Lake Washington Ship Canal's opening was celebrated on July 4, 1917, exactly 63 years after Seattle pioneer Thomas Mercer (1813-1898) first proposed the idea of connecting the saltwater of Puget S...
Estella Leopold, daughter of famed conservationist and writer Aldo Leopold (1887-1948), earned her own renown through her pioneering work as a conservationist and scientist. As a conservationist, she ...
John H. McGraw was elected Washington state's second governor in 1892. He arrived in Seattle from Maine during the 1870s at the age of 26, and got a job as a clerk in the Occidental Hotel. He joined S...
Between the 1880s and 1920s, an armada of steamships known as the Mosquito Fleet was a main means of transportation on Puget Sound. Often jerry rigged, usually reliable, occasionally less seaworthy th...
The majority of Seattle's parks were designed by the Olmsted Brothers landscape architecture firm. John Charles Olmsted (1852-1920), the stepson of Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903), who designed Cent...
When Seattle was founded in 1851, Lake Union was the backwater of a backwater town. A natural dam at Montlake sealed it off from Lake Washington, while only a tiny stream through Fremont drained it in...
Beginning about 14,900 years ago, salmon begin to colonize Puget Sound. During the last ice age, when a 3,000-foot-thick glacier moved out of Canada and traveled as far south as Olympia, no salmon, or...
Beginning about 7,000 years ago, the climate become more like the modern era, relatively wetter and cooler than in the previous 3,000 years. With this change the ecosystems of the Puget lowland began ...
In April 1596, English merchant Michael Lok and Apostolos Valerianos, a Greek pilot and mariner, meet in Venice to discuss a voyage that Valerianos had taken in 1592. The mariner, who was better known...
On May 29, 1792, Captain George Vancouver creates the name Puget's Sound to honor his lieutenant Peter Puget. Vancouver is on his exploratory ship, the HMS Discovery, anchored off Restoration Point, w...
In the spring of 1833, the Hudson's Bay Company begins work on Fort Nisqually. The HBC crew uses cedar to build houses, a store, and protective walls. They also farm the surrounding lands planting veg...
On November 12, 1836, the steamship Beaver arrives at Fort Nisqually, making it the first steamer on Puget Sound. The Beaver's docking culminates a voyage that began in London, where the Beaver was bu...
Sometime in the 1860s, Harvey L. Pike (ca. 1842-1897) begins work on cutting a channel between Union Bay on Lake Washington and Portage Bay on Lake Union. Pike does not progress very far and soon aban...
On Friday, May 1, 1874, the citizens of Seattle travel by boat, foot, and horse to the mouth of the Duwamish River to start work on Seattle's second railroad, the Seattle & Walla Walla. Nearly eve...
On June 8, 1876, the Seattle City Council passes an ordinance for the first ever large-scale grading of a Seattle street. For the next 11 months, contractor George Edwards and his crews use picks, sho...
On December 2, 1896, the "giant Palouse earthworm" as it will come to be called, is first reported. Rennie Wilbur Doane of the Department of Botany and Zoology at the Washington Agricultural College a...
On October 27, 1909, hundreds of people gather to watch the beginning of the excavation for the Lake Washington Ship Canal. The event takes place at the isthmus between Union Bay and Portage Bay. Foll...
On July 26, 1910, University of Washington professors Theodore C. Frye and Carl E. Magnusson are granted the patent for seatron, a substitute for candied citron. Their plan involves collecting macroal...
On January 31, 1911, Governor Marion Hay (1865-1933) pardons J. K. Edmiston (1861-?), an early Seattle developer best known for building the Rainier Avenue Electric Railway and promoting the Columbia ...
On March 13, 1914, high water in Lake Union leads to the failure of the Fremont Dam at the lake's western outlet. The lake drops 8.5 feet in 24 hours, which results in washed-out bridges, the loss of ...