E. H. Harriman, president of Union Pacific Railroad, sends a representative to Seattle to purchase land for a new terminal in 1907.

  • By Heather M. MacIntosh
  • Posted 2/22/1999
  • HistoryLink.org Essay 926
See Additional Media

In 1907, E. H. Harriman (1848-1909), president of the Union Pacific Railroad Co., sends a representative to Seattle to purchase land for trackage and construction of a new terminal. The Union Pacific’s interest in purchasing lots in Seattle’s southern tidelands plays a large part in a real estate boom that claims plots of land located at the time under water in Elliott Bay. Ultimately, the land originating in these tidelands brings some $150,000,000 in transfers.

Connecting an Emerging City

During the first decade of the twentieth century, interest in reclaiming the tidelands south of the city’s center paralleled railroad development. For decades before the Union Pacific’s 1907 purchase, locomotives were a constant presence along the waterfront, from Pioneer Square north to Smith Cove. Trains arrived from the south on wooden trestles and pilings anchored to the bottom of Elliott Bay. The reclamation of Seattle’s southern tidelands (known in the late 1990s as the SoDo district) provided a level surface for rail traffic and for industry. Harriman would construct his station at 4th Avenue S and Jackson Street, providing an impressive southern gateway to the emerging and expanding Northwest city.


Sources:

“Railroading in Seattle,” The Seattle Times Magazine, December 31, 1944, p. 5; Pacific Record, Tidelands Publicity, 1912.


Licensing: This essay is licensed under a Creative Commons license that encourages reproduction with attribution. Credit should be given to both HistoryLink.org and to the author, and sources must be included with any reproduction. Click the icon for more info. Please note that this Creative Commons license applies to text only, and not to images. For more information regarding individual photos or images, please contact the source noted in the image credit.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License
Major Support for HistoryLink.org Provided By: The State of Washington | Patsy Bullitt Collins | Paul G. Allen Family Foundation | Museum Of History & Industry | 4Culture (King County Lodging Tax Revenue) | City of Seattle | City of Bellevue | City of Tacoma | King County | The Peach Foundation | Microsoft Corporation, Other Public and Private Sponsors and Visitors Like You