History of Seattle

Members of the Duwamish and Suquamish tribes first inhabited the site of modern-day Seattle. They visited the area seasonally to harvest and dry salmon.

( Alki Point's Lighthouse )

The city itself was founded by the Denny party, made up of two dozen American settlers. They landed on the rainy beach at Alki Point in West Seattle in 1851. Within a year, the community moved east to a more sheltered site on Elliott Bay and began to clear the dense forest back from the shore.

In 1853 Washington Territory was created by splitting the Oregon Territory. That same year, settler Henry Yesler set up a steam-powered sawmill on the waterfront near today’s Pioneer Square.

Seattle’s little settlement was just one of several scattered along the shores of Puget Sound. The sawmill’s steam engine was soon belching smoke into the salty air, preparing lumber to build the homes, schoolhouses, churches, and shops of the settlement.

Seattle incorporated in 1865 when the town numbered 350 men, women, and children. At incorporation the city covered only 26 sq km (10 sq mi), spanning the hilly strip of land between Elliott Bay and Lake Washington that today includes downtown, the Central District, and much of Capitol Hill.

Seattle competed for business with the territorial capitol of Olympia and large sawmill towns on Puget Sound such as Port Blakely and Port Townsend. Everett, Tacoma, and Seattle fought bitterly to become the Northern Pacific Railroad’s West Coast terminus, eager for the Northwest monopoly on transcontinental freight and passengers.

When the railroad chose Tacoma as its terminus, local Seattle citizens refused to be downhearted and built their own railroad in 1878. The railroad linked King County’s rich coalfields directly to Seattle’s harbor wharves.

In the 1880s, as Washington Territory moved toward statehood, the local economy boomed and the population soared. As logging grew more mechanized, Washington’s timber industry prospered.

In 1884 Washington loggers cut more than one million board feet for the first time, and their yield increased tenfold between 1880 and 1890. During that decade, Seattle’s population skyrocketed from 3,553 to 42,837 as newcomers and immigrants hoped to take part in the city’s prosperity.

In 1883 Beacon Hill, Queen Anne Hill, and Madison Park were annexed to the city, followed in 1891 by Green Lake, the University District, Magnolia, and Fremont, bringing Seattle’s area to 77 sq km (30 sq mi).

However, population growth and immigration had their downsides as well. In the mid-1880s Seattle racial tensions reached a breaking point over economic competition from Chinese immigrants.

Chinese men had originally been recruited to the American West to build the transcontinental railroads and had stayed on in cities like Seattle when the railroads were complete. Many Chinese were willing to work longer hours at lower wages doing harder jobs than white workers, and whites complained that the immigrants were taking jobs away from them.

Resentment grew, and in 1885 three Chinese men were shot to death in a hop-picking camp at Issaquah, near Seattle. Then in February 1886 mobs in Tacoma and Seattle drove Chinese residents from their homes and out of town.

In June 1889 Seattle was damaged by a fire that started when a pot of melting glue spilled in a carpenter’s shop. The great fire burned 26 hectares (64 acres) of the city, largely made up of two-story wooden buildings, in just a few hours, causing damage estimated at more than $10 million. However, within two years Seattle had rebuilt itself and was transformed by dozens of new four- and five-story buildings of brick and stone.

Seattle’s residential and industrial growth was slowed by the national recession that began in 1893. But in July 1897 gold was discovered along the streams of Canada’s Yukon River, and Seattle began a spectacular boom in the subsequent Klondike Gold Rush. Seattle marketed itself as the portal to the goldfields, selling hopeful miners their outfits and their steamship tickets, as well as entertainment.

As the gold strikes spread from the Canadian territories to Alaska, Seattle continued to grow in wealth and population. After Seattle gained a federal assay office, which allowed miners to put their gold on deposit, successful miners passed through the city on their way home from the goldfields, and many decided to settle down.

In the wake of the gold rush, Seattle’s population exploded. In 1900 the city’s population stood at 80,871; by 1910 it had nearly tripled to 237,174. Between 1907 and 1910 the city also grew to 184 sq km (71 sq mi), annexing West Seattle and Ballard to the west, Laurelhurst to the north, and Rainier Valley to the south.

Local promoters envisioned Seattle’s future as a Pacific Rim port, shipping goods to Alaska, Canada, and Asia. In 1909 Seattle hosted a fair, the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, on the University of Washington campus.

The fair showcased Seattle to the world not only as a polished metropolis with office blocks and beautiful parks, but also as a great seaport and city of industry. World War I (1914-1918) brought increased industrial opportunities to Seattle, especially to its waterfront.

The amount of tonnage that passed through the port of Seattle in 1918 was not exceeded until 1965. Wartime also finally brought the completion of the Lake Washington Ship Canal, linking the lake with Puget Sound. Local shipyards worked round the clock, and the fledgling Boeing Company received wartime contracts for 100 airplanes.

After the war, as local shipyards lost their federal contracts, wages fell, and many people lost their jobs. Seattle experienced the first general strike in North America, as more than 50,000 workers stayed home February 6 through 11, 1919.

Throughout the 1920s the city grew steadily, although the region was affected by depressed farm and timber prices. In the early 1930s Seattle’s economy suffered as the United States entered the Great Depression. In 1932 Seattle’s workers experienced an unemployment rate of 25 percent, and people in the fishing, logging, and mill industries suffered even higher joblessness.

However, Seattle’s economy improved when World War II (1939-1945) began. Seattle started to mobilize its industries for war, gearing up its shipyards and factories, more than two years before the United States actually entered the conflict in 1941. But for Seattle, the war really began on December 7, 1941, the day Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.

Following Executive Order 9066, thousands of local Japanese Americans, most of them citizens born in the United States, were forcibly relocated in the spring of 1942 from city apartments and country farms to internment camps far inland.

The war tested the people of Seattle in many ways. More than 1,100 King County servicemen and -women lost their lives in World War II. As men went off to war, women and racial minorities trained to take their places in local factories; by 1944, 50 percent of Boeing workers were female.

At its Seattle plants, Boeing built nearly 7,000 B-17 Flying Fortresses during the course of the war, and in 1945 four B-29 Superfortresses rolled off Boeing production lines daily. Seattle’s industrial economy was transformed by wartime production.

When the war ended in 1945, military contracts were canceled and Seattle’s boom came to an abrupt close. Work in Puget Sound shipyards dried up, and the shipbuilding payroll fell from nearly 200,000 to 10,000. Thousands applied for unemployment benefits, and a series of devastating strikes rocked shipyards, logging camps, lumber mills, and aircraft factories.

Postwar turmoil also affected the local political climate. In 1947 Washington’s Senate and House of Representatives approved a resolution to establish a Joint Legislative Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities in the State of Washington. Washington State had become widely known for its left-leaning heritage.

In fact, U.S. Postmaster General James Farley quipped in 1940 that there were 47 states and the Soviet of Washington. After World War II, as Washington suburbanized and prospered on Cold War federal contracts, many residents grew embarrassed by their state’s notoriety. The committee was directed to conduct a thorough and impartial investigation of Communist infiltration in Washington and to report its findings to frame new legislation against subversives in the state.

Chaired by freshman legislator Albert Canwell, the committee held public hearings in Seattle in 1948. The committee inquired into alleged Communist infiltration of the Washington Pension Union, the Washington Commonwealth Federation, the University of Washington, and other state institutions.

Foreshadowing the anti-Communist investigations of Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s, the well-publicized Canwell Committee hearings ruined careers and tarnished reputations.

In the 1950s residential suburbs spread north of the city and throughout Lake Washington’s Eastside, as the G.I. Bill made it possible for World War II veterans to buy new homes inexpensively.

Seattle’s northern boundary moved from 85th Street to 145th Street, incorporating a district then exploding with suburban growth. By the mid-1950s Boeing was booming again, building passenger jetliners as well as military airplanes, missiles, and spacecraft. In 1956 one of every two industrial workers in Seattle’s metropolitan area worked for Boeing.

In 1962 Seattle hosted a world’s fair, the Century 21 Exposition. The fair was originally intended to be a 50th-anniversary celebration of the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, but promoters of the city dramatically reshaped it.

The fair became a celebration of Seattle’s coming of age as an international city, presenting confident visions of a high-tech 21st century. Nearly 10 million visitors passed through the fair’s turnstiles. Century 21 gave the world a view of the great urban center that Seattle had become.

But Seattle’s economy went into abrupt free fall in the late 1960s. Commercial airlines fell on hard times as the nation stumbled into inflation, oil shortages, and unemployment. Boeing’s sales slowed and then halted.

Beginning in 1970 Boeing logged no new orders for its jetliners during a 17-month period. The local Boeing payroll plummeted from more than 100,000 in 1968 to a low of 32,500 in 1971. As Boeing fell on hard times, so did other area businesses, and local unemployment rose to 17 percent. During Boeing’s troubles, the standing joke in the rapidly depopulating city was, “Will the last person leaving Seattle turn out the lights?”

At the same time, industries based on the Northwest’s natural resources, such as fish and timber, also began to suffer. New environmental legislation protected old-growth timber as a wildlife habitat, not as an extractive resource. Fewer salmon returned to spawn each year, and in 1979 the U.S.

Supreme Court upheld a five-year-old ruling that Washington native peoples were entitled to 50 percent of all salmon caught in the state, further restricting the catch. Communities that depended on logging and fishing experienced soaring unemployment as old ways of making a living declined.

As old industries struggled in the Seattle area, entirely new ones sprang up. The local economy grew faster and richer as a high-tech start-up culture prospered in Seattle, including software, medical device, and Internet companies.

As an indication of Seattle's increased stature during the 1990s, the city hosted a meeting of the third ministerial conference of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1999.

Protesters against the WTO clashed with police in downtown Seattle and succeeded in delaying the opening of the conference, at which WTO members planned to discuss lowering tariffs and other barriers to international trade. The clashes led the mayor of Seattle to impose a curfew and ban protests in a section of downtown during the meeting.

Seattle's economic strength still depended heavily on Boeing, which announced major job cutbacks in the late 1990s after plane orders were cancelled in its Asian markets. Despite those cuts, the regional economy as a whole grew at a rapid pace in the late 1990s, fueled by the new high-tech industries.

The high-tech industry, however, was soon to have its own problems. Software startups that sought to make money on the Internet were negatively affected by the so-called dot.com bust of 2000, which coincided with a nationwide recession.

Many Seattle-area startups either went out of business or laid off substantial numbers of employees, after venture capital funding dried up and stock values hit record lows.

The city suffered another blow in 2001 when Boeing moved its headquarters to Chicago, Illinois. For several years unemployment in the Seattle area was higher than the national average, and many high-tech workers found it difficult to find employment in their chosen field.

By 2005 the Seattle area had rebounded from the recession and the dot.com bust. Boeing won new airplane contracts and remained the largest employer with 62,000 workers in the Puget Sound area, while Microsoft continued to grow, with more than 30,000 workers in the region.

Seattleites took civil pride in the success of the Seahawks football team, which reached the Super Bowl for the first time in 2006. The metropolitan area still looked for ways, however, to manage the challenges posed by growth: urban sprawl, traffic congestion, and environmental problems.