Seattle Now and Then

Seattle Now & Then: Fisher Flour, Harbor Island, 1938

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(Click and click again to enlarge photos)

THEN: Along the west side of Harbor Island, the Fisher Flouring Mill silos loom large behind the company’s office on Jan. 24, 1938. The mill opened in 1911. Two years prior, while looking at Elliott Bay from downtown, founder Oliver Williams Fisher is said to have told his son, Oliver David, “Look at the ships in the harbor. This is the place for a flour mill. We would have a free right of way to the world!” (Puget Sound Regional Branch, Washington State Archives)
NOW: Cari Simson, in top hat, and Elke Hautala of Invisible Histories flank Kate Becker, King County creative economy director, in this wider shot outside the former office of Fisher Flouring Mill. Next door, from 6 to 10 p.m. Thursday and Friday, April 23 and 24, at Harbor Island Studios, Simson and Hautala will present “History Comes Alive at Harbor Island.” For info and tickets, visit Invisible-Histories.com. (Clay Eals)

Published in The Seattle Times online on April 2, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on April 5, 2026

‘Invisible’ stories of century-old Harbor Island come alive in April
By Clay Eals

Harbor Island could be the most visible invisible place in Seattle.

Noticeable to anyone viewing the waterfront from any angle, it’s a busy south-end industrial center and catalyst for international commerce. Yet for most, it’s off the beaten path. Unless you’re among the 2,000 who make a daily living there or you pilot trucks, trains and ships to and from, it can be a mysterious place.

Elke Hautala of Seattle’s Greenwood neighborhood and Cari Simson of Edmonds aim to change that. The friends operate Lake City-based Invisible Histories, an educational enterprise supported by a nonprofit fiscal sponsorship. Their playful logo cleverly combines a shovel and microphone.

Click the image to learn more about the April 23-24 event!

The initial foray of these pop historians came five years ago when they forged the Halloween season’s popular Georgetown Haunted History Tours. They have branched into monthly podcasts and live shows that seek to entertain while they inform. In that vein, their next retro extravaganza on Thursday and Friday, April 23 and 24, focuses on Harbor Island.

The fundamental fact about the 397-acre island is that before 1909, it simply didn’t exist.

Trade ambitions sparked by imminent completion of the 1914 Panama Canal triggered a multi-decade transformation of Seattle’s only riverbed. Mudflats and shifting channels at the Duwamish River’s mouth thus became an artificial land bar, composed of 24 million cubic yards of dirt dredged from the straightened, widened and deepened waterway and sliced from the city’s regraded Denny and Beacon hills.

Seen from the air as roughly a trapezoid, Harbor Island boasts an equally irregular past — perfect grist for theatrics planned by Hautala and Simson.

THEN: In this postcard circa 1911-1913, Fisher Flouring Mill presides along the Duwamish River’s West Waterway. (University of Washington Special Collections)

For their April shows,  home base will be the ground-level soundstages of King County’s Harbor Island Studios, part of the island’s massive former Fisher Flouring Mill. From its opening in 1911, Fisher’s towering silos and a pervasive retail presence (including Fisher Scones, a staple of Northwest fairs) made the mill the island’s most eye-catching business until its 2002 closure.

Beyond the island’s evolution, the presentations will examine the site’s geologic and indigenous pre-history. It also will explore the waterway explosion of Russia-bound munitions pre-World War I, the Prohibition reign of Fisher family-connected bootleggers Roy and Elise Olmstead and a segregated Black soldier base nearby during World War II. Another topic: the infamous 1978 ramming of the low-level Spokane Street Bridge, which instigated the 140-foot-high West Seattle Bridge that soars above the island today.

The goal, Hautala and Simson say, is to assemble “artists, performers, filmmakers, storytellers, musicians and more to share diverse cultural and creative perspectives as we peel back the layers of Harbor Island history.”

In short, to make the invisible visible.

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Elki Hautala and Cari Simson for their invaluable help with this installment!

To see Clay Eals‘ 360-degree video of the “Now” prospect and compare it with the “Then” photos while hearing this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column.

Below, you will find 6 additional photos and 8 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com, Washington Digital Newspapers and other sources that were helpful in the preparation of this column.

THEN: Queen Anne Hill looms in the distance of this north-looking view along the west side of Fisher Flouring and the West Waterway of the Duwamish River on Jan. 25, 1938. (Puget Sound Regional Branch, Washington State Archives)
NOW: From right, Cari Simson and Elke Hautala show the exterior of Harbor Island Studios (formerly Fisher Flouring Mill) to several  presenters in preparation for the April 23-24 event.
THEN: This northwest-facing Seattle Water Department view of the East Waterway of the Duwamish River on June 3, 1913, illustrates dredging that continued to build up Harbor Island. (Seattle Municipal Archives)
THEN: The north end of Harbor Island appears at left in this panorama looking northwest from Hanford Street on May 5, 1915. Fisher Flouring Mill is out of frame at left. (Seattle Municipal Archives)
THEN: At Seattle City Light’s University District office on May 15, 1962, a Fisher Flouring display features company products including Scone Mix, Golden 27 flour and Instant Zoom whole-wheat cereal. (Seattle Municipal Archives)
THEN: Harbor Island tops this aerial of the mouth of the dredged Duwamish River about 1920. (Paul Dorpat Collection)
As described by West Seattle’s Ron Tjerandsen: “I came across this painting by Jacob Elshin done in the 1930s, which is in the Seattle Art Museum. His viewpoint must have been from the old bascule bridge over the Duwamish River. The background is Fisher Mill, and the shipyard in the foreground was my grandfather’s Maritime Boat Works. Nice happenstance.” (Courtesy Ron Tjerandsen)
April 24, 1907, Seattle Times, p10.
Jan. 10, 1910, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, p3.
June 27, 1910, Seattle Times, p9.
July 3, 1910, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, p42.
Jan. 15, 1911, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, p7.
Jan. 22, 1911, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, p58.
May 6, 1911, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, p15.
May 18, 1911, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, p5.

2 thoughts on “Seattle Now & Then: Fisher Flour, Harbor Island, 1938”

  1. Clay, I think you have an error in your column. While working on my book “Too High and Too Steep,” I tried to determine the history of Harbor Island and what the source material was. I was surprised to find limited information, but as far as I could determine, no sediments from either the Denny Regrades or Beacon Hill projects ended up in Harbor Island. A small amount, perhaps 100,000 of 11 million cubic yards of Denny ended up along the shoreline but most was dumped into Elliott Bay. And when Semple was blasting away for his South Canal, all of that material simply ended up at the base of Beacon Hill.

    Based on what I could find out, the majority of Harbor Island was formed from excavating the East and West Waterways on either side of the island. In addition, when trying to come up with a number for the amount of fill used, the only contemporary one I found was from an April 24, 1907 Seattle Times article that mentions 7 million cubic yards and not 24 million cubic yards. The 7 million number could, of course, be wrong but I couldn’t find any documents from that era that contradicted it.

    Reply

    1. David, thanks for your comment. You could be right. I consulted several sources, including your book, for this installment, and while info is both limited and conflicting, for the sources of dirt I opted to rely on the summary statement in this HistoryLink article: https://www.historylink.org/File/22852. Perhaps a definitive explanation awaits us all!

      Reply

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