(click to enlarge photos)
Published in The Seattle Times on-line on Sept. 26, 2024
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Sept. 29, 2024
A buried maritime treasure sleeps beneath Seattle streets
by Jean Sherrard
It’s safe to assume that Seattle is the only American city with a nearly forgotten sailing ship buried below its downtown streets.
5:45 p.m. on Dec. 30, 1876, the Windward ran aground at Whidbey Island’s Useless Bay, having mistaken a beach fire for the Admiralty Point Lighthouse during what a keeper called “a perfect gale.”
Hauling 525,000 board feet of lumber from James Colman’s mill on Seattle’s waterfront, the 650-ton bark was bound for San Francisco, helmed by Capt. A.E. Williams with a crew of 15.
Williams, wrote the Puget Sound Dispatch, returned to Seattle by canoe on New Year’s Day with grim news. The Windward, he reported, “is now lying, dismasted and on her beam ends … about a mile from the beach.” Owned by Colman (known for Colman Dock) and partners, the vessel was only partially insured, though most of its cargo was saved.
Declared a complete loss, the Windward was towed back to Seattle and deposited on tide flats.
For years to come, its distinctive oak hull photobombed panoramic portraits of Seattle’s waterfront. Colman used it for storage and allegedly maintained a ‘pied-à-mer’ in its deck cabins.
One day, teenaged Charles Kinnear, whose father, George, donated Queen Anne Hill’s Kinnear Park to Seattle, swam to the hulk at low tide. “We boys tore copper from her bottom and dived from her decks,” he later recalled. Though the tall masts had long disappeared, “they provided,” Kinnear said, “many souvenir canes” for local dandies.
On occasion, the derelict hosted festivity. On July 2, 1877, the Daily Intelligencer suggested, “Walking a greased pole, for a ten dollar prize, off the old bark Windward will be very amusing.”
In the late 1880s, with the filling in of then-Railroad Avenue (today’s Alaskan Way), the vessel was buried intact. Debris from the 1889 Great Seattle Fire extended the fill.
Every few decades since then, Seattle historians remembered the Windward’s underground presence.
Clarence Bagley in 1901 reminded readers of the “dismantled craft … [that] still lies in the mud” on Western Avenue “with her stern projecting into Marion Street.”
In 1949, Seattle Times columnist C.T. Conover re-imagined it under the same streets “throbbing with modern traffic, its bow pointed … toward the harbor as if eager to be once again at the scenes of its former glory.”
And in 1982, Paul Dorpat whimsically suggested that the Windward “no longer sways with the tides … [but] permanently jaywalks below Western Avenue.”
Today, aiming time’s arrow once again, we encourage waterfront visitors to take a dreamy breath and envision Seattle’s buried maritime treasure beneath their feet.
WEB EXTRAS
To view our narrated 360 video of this column, please click here!
Quick thanks to Bill Kintner who sent a note that indicates San Francisco also has ships buried under streets.
Also Patrick Poor, who finds evidence that New York does too!
Chalk one up for the wisdom of the crowd.
During the excavation for the foundations of the two World Trade Center towers in New York, they cut through the buried remains of a Dutch ship dating from Manhattan was their colony. It was believed to the Tyger, see Jstor article at https://www.jstor.org/stable/529708. This was reported in an issue of Natural History magazine back in the early 1970s.
Superb article. History often lies buried underfoot. In this case, literally.
Feliks Banel reposts news of the mid block brick building demolition and eventual excavation adjacent/above possible grave of Windward and David Wilma posts this snip: Seattle Intelligencer 25 May 1880
“The tide of yesterday forenoon was lower, we are told by one who claims to know, than it has been for years. The copper of the bark Windward, as she lies in the mud off Columbia street, was stripped from the deserted hulk four years ago [1876] as low as the lowest tides would then permit. Yesterday a strip two feet lower could have been taken off. The immense (extent?) of Seattle at the mud flats were made …” Camera up the quad-copters!