(click to enlarge photos)


Given its generous prospect, we might have expected that Seattle’s earliest photographers would have made many climbs up Beacon Hill for recording panoramas of the city. If I have counted correctly, there were a mere half-dozen pans taken from the hill before the city’s Great Fire of 1889. Carlton Watkins, the itinerant California photographer best known for his early records of the Yosemite Valley, shot the earliest one in 1882. We featured it in this column a century later on October 3, 1982.


By comparison, local recorder George Moore made his first pan of the city aiming south from Denny Hill in 1872. That was thirteen years after E.A. Clark, almost certainly the city’s first resident with a camera, recorded the city’s first extant photograph, a daguerreotype of Sarah and Henry Yesler’s home at the northeast corner of James Street and Front Street (First Avenue).


To repeat this week we return to Beacon Hill’s desirable prospect with Theo E. Peiser’s 1884-85 pan of the city and its tideflats. Peiser’s pan shows four rail-supporting trestles heading across Plummer’s Bay to the Beacon Hill shoreline. The parallel quays on the left were new in 1884, and the space between them was soon filled with oversized warehouses. This was Puget Sound’s most prosperous trans-shipment harbor, “where rails meets sails.” (And soon steamers, as well.) This is Seattle, the “Seaport of Success,” and the booming beginning of its now 137 years as Washington State’s principal metropolis.

Seattle historian Kurt E. Armbruster is the most helpful unraveler of the sometimes snarl of Seattle’s railroading history. The Washington State University Press recently reprinted his book “Orphan Road”. We highly recommend it to PacificNW readers who especially want to research the “rails meet sails” part of our pioneer history. Our readers might also wish to consult my “Illustrated History of the Seattle Waterfront,” available for free use on our blog dorpatsherrardlomont, in which I often quote from Armbruster’s book.
WEB EXTRAS
Anything to add, compadres? We have rummaged our files for you Jean. May your and your student’s play go well – the one you are producing soon at Hillside School which rests in its own forest wonderland near the top of Bellevue’s Cougar Mountain. (Which means if there is a heavy snow, the students generally stay home.) Interested, dear reader, in Hillside’s offerings for your children or the children of others?
You will find near the top of this blog a bug or icon to click, which will take you to the school’s web page. A good advertisement for a Hillside education is Jean himself. Now 60 years old (oh my!) Jean was its first student, and now teaches drama and writing there, and produces the plays his students perform. [Sincerely Signed, Paul Dorpat]
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