Pop Quiz: What happened on May 3, 1907? Answer: Columbia City, an incorporated town since 1893, was annexed to the City of Seattle. Next spring marks the 100th anniversary of this milestone, and the Rainier Valley Historical Society plans to celebrate. We'll begin with a series of articles exploring Columbia City's history over the last century, and end up with a community event on Saturday, May 5. If you'd like to be involved in planning the party, please contact us!
First on our tour of Columbia City history topics has to be the streetcar line. While there were certainly people living in the Rainier Valley long before the streetcar was built, Columbia City as we know it owes its existence to J.K. Edmiston and the streetcar line he built in 1890.
Edmiston, a real estate developer, had just platted 40 recently-logged acres in the heart of the Rainier Valley. He called his prospective town Columbia, and named the major streets after historical explorers: Henry Hudson, Ferdinand Magellan, and Christopher Columbus (Columbus Street later became Edmonds). In order to get people out to his development, he built the Rainier Avenue Electric Railway, connecting Columbia to downtown Seattle. This was before Dearborn was cut through between First Hill and Beacon Hill, so a counterbalance ran underground at Washington Street to pull the streetcars over the hill and into the Rainier Valley.
On April 4, 1891, the first lots went up for sale, and Edmiston brought potential homebuyers out to Columbia on flatbed railcars crowded with chairs. Lots sold for $300: $10 down and $1 per week for 300 weeks. In order to get these terms, buyers had to agree to build homes on their lots within a year. At the end of a month, Edmiston claimed to have sold 600 lots, a figure that was almost certainly exaggerated to boost further sales.
About 32 homes were built in that first year. By 1893, Columbia had incorporated as a town; by 1900 there were 659 people living in Columbia, and when the town was annexed to Seattle in 1907, it was a thriving mill town of more than 1,500 residents. None of this would have happened without the streetcar.
Columbia wasn't the only development spurred by the Rainier Avenue Electric Railway. Streetcar stations, with their grocery and drug stores, bakeries and post offices, anchored small communities from Atlantic Street to Rainier Beach. The streetcar line moved people, produce, lumber, and other goods up and down the Rainier Valley. The railway also employed conductors and repairmen, many of who lived along the line as well.
While many of the electric railways were eventually taken over by the city, the Rainier line remained privately owned. The line expanded, changing hands and names several times, always struggling financially but never quite collapsing. One owner, W.R. Crawford, tried to introduce zone fares in 1911, but backed down after angry passengers would refuse to pay or leave the cars. When the city tried to build a competing line, Crawford initially refused to accept rival transfers, but again, passenger protests changed his mind.
In the late 1910s, Rainier Avenue was built alongside the streetcar tracks, signaling the rise of the automobile as a mode of transportation. As cars became more and more popular, ridership and public support for the streetcar waned. By the 1930s, many citizens considered the unpaved streetcar tracks in the middle of Rainier to be at best a nuisance, and at worst a "thoroughfare of death."
In 1934 the railway's franchise was not renewed. On January 1, 1937, the last streetcar pulled into the car barns at Hudson Street, and the streetcar era in Rainier Valley came to and end. Though the double loss of jobs and transit options was a blow to the community, especially in the middle of the Great Depression, citizens celebrated the removal of the rails that summer with a parade featuring Miss Seattle, among other beauties.
The rails were shipped to Japan as scrap metal. Bad timing: just a few years later a Rainier Valley father fighting in the South Pacific told his son back home, "They're shooting those Rainier Avenue streetcar rails back at us now."
Well, 70 years after Miss Seattle's triumphant tour of a freshly paved, rail-free Rainier Avenue, we find ourselves weaving our way through Sound Transit's light rail construction along Martin Luther King Jr. Way South. It's only fitting that after all these years we are returning to our "transit-oriented development" roots.
Mikala Woodward is the president of the Rainier Valley Historical Society. Visit the society's website at www.rainiervalleyhistory.org. Mikala may be reached though editor@sdistrictjournal.com.[[In-content Ad]]
