Ballast Island (Seattle)

About

Ballast Island was a small artificial island located on the Seattle Waterfront during the late 1800s. Frequent illegal dumping of ballast led to the designation of a specific region of the Seattle harbor where dumping was permitted. Emerging above the surface around 1880, it grew rapidly following additional dock developments in 1881 which largely encircled the island. It became an encampment site and refuge for Native American migrant workers from across the North Pacific coast, many of whom were employed seasonally as hop pickers. They were later joined by refugees of the city's indigenous Duwamish, following the destruction of a West Seattle village by white vigilantes. It additionally became a beacon for tourists, interested in seeing the native camps. Although encampments were more tolerated on the island than in other areas in the city, the native workers were increasingly viewed as squatters by local press. The Seattle Police Department repeatedly attempted to evict the occupants of the island during the 1890s, although were only able to clear the island for limited periods. Dock, road, and warehouse expansion ended native residence on the island in 1898. The island was eventually subsumed by fill during rail expansion in the 1900s, with much of the former island now lying several meters beneath various modern developments, including Alaskan Way. The boring of the SR 99 tunnel raised concerns that the site of the island would be disturbed, although state archaeological testing later confirmed that the island was not impacted by the project. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2021.

During much of the 19th century, merchant ships arriving at Seattle docked along the coast of Elliott Bay, dumping their stabilizing ballast, often rocks or bricks, along the bay before loading cargo. Initially prohibited, the necessity of unloading ballast led to the designation of an offshore location south of Yesler Wharf as a dumping site. Some sources describe the decision to locate the ballast dump adjacent to the Yesler Wharf as an attempt to protect the wharf from shipworms. Beginning with Henry Yesler's sawmill in 1854, waterfront companies also began dumping waste material into the water, using the piled debris for land reclamation.

The pile of ballast began to emerge above the surface c. 1880, forming an artificial islet dubbed Ballast Island. The Oregon Improvement Company's (OIC) construction of two large docks near the site greatly accelerated this process, with dockworkers discarding hundreds of tons of ballast into the water below. The expanding island of ballast was largely enclosed by the OIC's Ocean and City Docks, and became accessible only by canoe, with visitors paddling between the dock's supports. The ballast material comprising the island included various forms of transported rocks such as sandstone cobbles, bricks, slag, schist, and granite. Mainly in the form of stones, particulates within the island ranged in size from sand to large boulders. Looser material such as sand, dirt, and sawdust was heaped atop the island. The surface reached several feet above the waterline. Telegraph Hill, San Francisco became a perennial source of ballast for Seattle-bound ships, due to the frequency of trade between Seattle and San Francisco during the period. In a 1936 history of Seattle, J. Willis Sayre described the sources of the ballast as including Valparaíso, Sydney, Boston, and Liverpool. This description, while impossible to verify, became frequently quoted in later histories of the city.

By the mid-1800s, significant numbers of Native American migrant workers had begun regular travel to the southern Puget Sound. They frequently camped in settlements along the Seattle waterfront during the 1860s and 70s. Worker camps emerged on Ballast Island soon after the island's creation, with residents sleeping in tents or canoes. While they were initially largely employed by sawmills, hop farming gained increasing primacy throughout the 1880s and 90s. Workers would typically stay on the island for several days to share news and trade goods, before traveling by rail to inland hop farms during the summer harvests. Itinerant native tradesmen would also visit the island to sell seafood and various handmade wares. Although likely initially limited to regional Coast Salish peoples, they were later joined at the site by seasonal migrants from British Columbia and Alaska. Before the mid-19th century, these northern nations had regularly conducted slave raids in the Puget Sound, but instead adopted migrant labor to fund potlatch ceremonies. Descriptions of the island were primarily limited to local newspapers, with the island first mentioned offhand in a November 1882 issue of the Post-Intelligencer. Native settlement on the island was initially treated as a novelty or romanticized, frequently attracting tourists and journalists to the island to see the Native residents, seen in popular thought as the last of a vanishing race of people.

Adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA). Photography via Wikimedia Commons.