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Murray C. Morgan
Thea Foss Waterway from mudflats to tomorrow's parks
The Tacoma News Tribune
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Copyright, 1960, Murray Morgan
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Thea Foss Waterway from
Mudflats to Tomorrow's Parks
 An
exhibition of photographs of "Thea Foss Waterway: Past
and Present" opens today at the Handforth Gallery in the
Tacoma Library at 11th and Tacoma Avenue. I haven't seen the
pictures chosen but since the waterway was literally under the
noses of photographers for 125 years, it should be a great show.
The
waterway these days is a fresh topic of redevelopment, with
planners envisioning expanses of parks, recreation and pedestrian
walkways. But the announcement of the Handforth exhibit set me to
thinking of moments when nobody was around with a camera.
On
the morning of May 20, 1792 two small boats from George
Vancouver's ship Discovery came south from the passage
between Vashon Island and the Peninsula. For the first time
Europeans looked eastward up the bay. No camera man caught it. But
Archibald Menzies, the Scot botanist, left a word picture:
"We had a most
charming prospect of Mount Rainier. The low land at the head of
the Bay swelled out very gradually to form a most beautiful and
majestic Mountain of great elevation whose line of ascent appeared
equally smooth & gradual on every side with a round obtuse
summit covered two thirds of its height down with perpetual snow
as were also the summits of a rugged ridge of Mountains that
proceeded from it to the Northward.
"Variable winds,
fine weather for our work. Two boats examined and surveyed
Commencement Bay and the rivers emptying into it." (The
rivers Sinclair mentioned were two branches of the Puyallup. One
followed approximately the river's present course across the
tideflats. The other, at least as large, swung sharply south and
emptied into the waterway across from today's 15th Street).
"These rivers,"
Sinclair continued, "form a small flat off their mouths which
is (word indecipherable) at low water but at high water boats may
go in and fill with water. Followed them up about two or three
miles. Low meadowlands on their banks covered with fine grass on
which vast numbers of ducks and geese were feeding.
"There was
another opening in the hills to the Southward as though another
small stream came in there but there was no water for the boats to
go up."
No
cameraman was on hand on April Fool's Day 10 years later when
Nicholas Delin, a Swedish immigrant who had come west during the
California gold rush, began building a dam to impound water for a
water-powered sawmill he intended to build at the head of the
waterway. No photos exist of the completed mill, or of the little
bark George W. Emery that lay for many days out in the bay while a
load of lumber was rafted down the shallow waterway and
manhandled, board by board, over the stern to be carried to San
Francisco.
Tacoma
did have a photographer by the time the first steam mill was built
in Old Town, beyond the entrance to the waterway. He was Anthony
Carr, son of founding father Job Carr. Tony had been a topographic
photographer for the Union Army and came to Tacoma in 1866.
Photographers
flocked in after the completion of the Northern Pacific railroad
in 1883. Most early pictures of the waterway were taken from the
tideflats looking toward the city. That angle displayed the rising
skyline. Shots looking out from the downtown bluff showed mostly
mud.
The
nature of the waterway changed dramatically after 1888 when the
St. Paul & Tacoma Lumber Company decided the mudflats could be
firmed up enough with pilings to support heavy industry. The
company acquired 200 acres from the Northern Pacific and started
work on what for a time was the largest sawmill in the world.
At
the same time the Tacoma Land Company, a subsidiary of the
Northern Pacific, had a giant dredge, 120 feet long and 32 feet
wide, towed north from San Diego. Anchored at the foot of 11th
Street, it worked around the dock for more than two years,
dredging 2,500 to 3,000 cubic yards of submerged silt and sand and
muck which it spewed out behind walls of pilings on both sides of
the channel.
When
three-inch-a-day rain, followed by a Chinook wind that melted the
snowpack, sent a record flood down the Puyallup in November,
carrying whole trees, dead cows, a barn and tons of silt into the
deepened waterway, and threatening both the St. Paul & Tacoma
mill and the Pacific Naptha Launch Company, workers managed to
block off the southern branch of the river. After the river fell,
the south bed was filled with mill waste and the Puyallup followed
pretty much its present course across the tideflats.
A
century of industrial growth followed.
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