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Orphan Road by Kurt E Armbruster The railroad comes to Seattle 1853-1911
Orphan Road by Kurt E Armbruster The railroad comes to Seattle 1853-1911
OUT OF DOWNTOWN SEATTLE, along a vagrant and unlikely looking streak of rust in the backwater of the city, one may meet the pioneer ghosts of old Seattle. Feeble and arthritic is this railroad track, straggling between nondescript buildings and giving every appearance of living on borrowed time. This is the oldest track in Seattle. Here, on May 1, 1874, wagons plodded to a halt beside a fork of the Duwamish River, rickety river steamers disembarked men in varying states of sobriety, and Henry Yesler and the Denny brothers pitched in with their neighbors to begin hacking a railroad into the forest.
Many worked as they hadn't in years, and next morning felt it in their bones. But all could reflect happily upon being present together in what they knew was a defining moment in their city's history. Blisters were perhaps fondly remembered three years later when a shiny new locomotive named the A.A. Denny rolled down this homemade track. After a fashion, Seattle had arrived. But it remained unconnected.
On November 13, 1851, Arthur A. Denny had stumped down the schooner Exact's gangplank to found a city. Denny lugged his family's belongings ashore-grim determination set upon his already stern features. He peered through the rain to see his wife, Mary, sitting on a trunk, weeping.
The stolid midwesterner commiserated as best he could, but no shadow of doubt clouded his vision: "My motto in life was to never go backward."
Denny saw the future clearly, and that meant connection with the East: "I came to the coast with the belief that a railroad would be built across the continent to some point on the northern coast within the next fifteen or twenty years, and [I] located on the Sound with that expectation."
Rude cabins went up, and the settlement was optimistically named New York. Surely, connection would not be long in coming. Indeed, within two years of Denny's landing at Alki Point, Washington Territory's first governor, Isaac I. Stevens, dangled the prospect of a railroad to Puget Sound within five years. But "New York" gave way to a strange-sounding new town-"Seattle"-and it took much longer, and much more of a struggle, to get that railroad than Denny ever imagined.
Instead of a natural partnership with a transcontinental line, Seattle found itself in a long and bitter feud with the railroad company it hoped would bring prosperity. Even after trains finally reached Seattle, keeping them coming proved to be problematic.
The hunger for connection grew, and in the words of Seattle's pioneer historian Clarence Bagley: "Imperial Richard on Bosworth field yearned no more fervently for a horse than did Seattle for a railroad."
Railroads-real and imaginary, blessed and cursed-would accompany Seattle through all the stages of its rise to maturity, and make a grand spectacle along the way.
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