Since I moved to Seattle, I’ve been reading about the city’s early history, when the Dennys and Borens and other early families settled on Elliot Bay in 1852 and began to build the town. They immediately began making their mark on the land—cutting trees and selling the timber to support their new lives in the West, building homes, and soon filing a plat for Seattle.
The topography of Seattle has changed ever since those first pioneers starting clearing the land. As the town developed, hills were leveled and marshy coastlines filled with the soil from those hills. And even more dramatically, Lake Washington was connected to Puget Sound by means of the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks and the Lake Washington Ship Canal.
I’ve written about the Ballard Locks before. But I was reminded of the significance of the locks and canals recently, when I read an article in The Seattle Times about the development of Seattle’s waterways.
At the turn of the 20th century, Seattle’s waterways were a patchwork of separate lakes, marshes, rivers, and tidal inlets. Lake Washington sat about 9 feet higher than it does today. Seasonal floods from mountain snow run-off swelled the lake, and the Black River flowed out of its southern end into the Duwamish River, which in turn ran into Puget Sound. Salmon Bay was a saltwater inlet that ebbed and flowed with Puget Sound’s tides.
For decades, city developers had wanted to connect Puget Sound to Lake Washington. A canal between the two bodies of water would let boats travel from mines and other commercial ventures on the east side of Lake Washington directly to the ocean, which would spur economic growth throughout the region. After years of debate, the massive project to build the Lake Washington Ship Canal and the locks broke ground in 1911 and was completed by 1917.
It was a huge engineering feat. Canals were carved through Seattle’s bedrock and marshland, and existing bridges rebuilt. Moreover, during the construction, water levels had to be managed carefully to avoid catastrophic flooding. When the canal was finished, Lake Washington dropped to the same level as Lake Union, The locks handled the drop between Lake Union and Puget Sound. The project also turned vast stretches of wetlands along the lake shore into dry land ready for development.
There were downsides to the development. The old Black River vanished entirely, along with its historic salmon runs — a loss that dramatically altered the ecology of the region and erased fishing grounds that had sustained Native peoples for generations.
The canal and locks also rewired Seattle’s economy. What had been a patchwork of separate waterways became a thriving maritime corridor. Salmon Bay, no longer a tidal inlet, turned into a freshwater basin sheltered by the locks and became a hub for sawmills, boatyards, and eventually fishing fleets. The locks themselves helped cement Seattle’s future as a major port city.
Today, the Ballard Locks are among the busiest in the United States, welcoming tens of thousands of vessels each year and drawing residents and visitors alike to watch boats, wildlife, and the annual salmon run. The canal and locks are now part of the city’s identity, and many locals forget that they are the result of human engineering that reshaped the land beneath our feet.
As a writer of historical fiction, I focused most on the photographs in The Seattle Times of the land before the canals and locks were in place. I wanted to see the world of the past—a world very different from the one we live in today, a world without waterways, commerce, or urban congestion. These photographs show how from pioneer days to the 21st century, Seattle’s geography has evolved. And I’m sure the area will continue to evolve as future developments are built.
More about the maritime history of Seattle can be found in David B. Williams and Jennifer Ott’s forthcoming book, Seattle’s Locks and Ship Canal: A History and Guide (HistoryLink in association with University of Washington Press, March 2026). These authors will be speaking about their book at the Museum of History and Industry in Seattle on March 24, from 6 to 8:30 p.m., as part of MOHAI’s Mercantile Literary Series.
What strikes you most when you look at old photographs of places you know?
