Seattle Now & Then: Where Rails Meet Sails – An 1884 view from Beacon Hill

jrsherrard

8 years ago

(click to enlarge photos)

THEN: Seattle pioneer photographer Theo E. Peiser’s mid-1880s panorama of pioneer Seattle when it was still awash in the tidelands south of King Street. One prominent landmark that our “then” and “now” share is the Magnolia Peninsula. (Courtesy, Museum of History and Industry)

NOW: I last visited this picnic prospect in Dr. Jose Rizal Park at the north end of Beacon Hill nearly a quarter-century ago. It was not this flora that impressed me then but the impressive tangle of the concrete trestles where Seattle’s freeways meet and mingle. Now much of the concrete is hidden behind the park’s orchard of apple and crabapple (genus Malus) trees. We are told by the Parks Department that the latter are the reddish ones.

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.

Watkin’s 1882 pan from a location some yards north of the prospect chosen later by Peiser. Note the changes. You can find the Watkins pan and its featured essay in Seattle Now and Then Volume One, which is featured on this blog. CLICK TO ENLARGE

Moore’s 1872 panorama of Seattle (combined from three prints) looking south from Denny Hill. Second Avenue cuts thru the center of the photograph, and Pike Street crosses it left to right until its path is interrupted by the roof of the shed in the foreground. The Beacon Hill horizon is at the pan’s center. Yesler Wharf juts into Elliott BAy on the right. The UW campus is upper-left on Denny’s Knoll. CLICK TO ENLARGE

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).

**E.A. Clark’s portrait, probably from his own camera, the first one (again probably) resident in Seattle.**

E.A. Clark’s recording of the Yesler home, with Sarah Yesler on the porch, is conventionally dated 1859, and so the earliest extant photo of any part of Seattle. And not surprisingly this is Pioneer Place or Square with the rough grade of James Street climbing First Hill with the water flume standing on its south side and extending from a tank of fresh water collected near what is now City Hall Park. The tree line is near Fifth Avenue. CLICK TO ENLARGE

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.

**First published in 2005 in a limited edition for Seattle Libraries and its City Council. A copy is also included on this blog.**

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.

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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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