Ballast Island
Ballast Island is an important site in both the history of Seattle’s global connections and the city’s Indigenous history. Unfortunately, the site is currently inaccessible due to construction on the new Seattle seawall.
In the nineteenth century, merchant ships carried heavy ballast that they dumped and replaced at ports of call with cargo. In Elliot Bay, ballast such as rocks and bricks from faraway cities such as San Francisco, Sydney, Boston, and Liverpool accumulated at the foot of Seattle lumber magnate Henry Yesler’s wharf, to which he added sawdust and woodchips.[1] Gradually, an island formed. In the words of one historian, Ballast Island “was a physical manifestation of Seattle’s connections to distant ports.”[2]
On Saturday, March 4, 1893, a man named Watson and a number of other West Seattle residents set fire to the historic Duwamish town called Herring’s House. The following Tuesday, many of the now-homeless Native people gathered at Ballast Island, an event notable enough for the Seattle Times to dispatch a reporter to the island.[3] Ballast Island was already a popular gathering place and stopping-over point for Native people both from Seattle and visiting on the way to work seasonally at the hop fields in Kent and Auburn.[4] The former residents of Herring’s House, however, were there to make a choice. They could move to the “lighthouse colony” at West Point, they could move upriver to the area around the confluence of the Black and Duwamish rivers where other Duwamish people already lived, they could leave Seattle and apply for an allotment at a reservation elsewhere in Puget Sound (such as Suquamish, Muckleshoot, or Tulalip), or they could stay. Refugees from Herring’s House chose all four of these options and their descendents continue to live in Seattle and around Puget Sound today.[5]
The historic marker (not currently visible) reads:
“In this area, once part of the bay, vessels from ports all over the world dumped their ballast. Untold thousands of tons were unloaded into the water by ship’s crews, including 40,000 tons from San Francisco’s telegraph hill.
The island, long a gathering place for Indians on their annual migrations, was covered in the 1890s by construction of railroad avenue (now called Alaskan Way).”
[1] Matthew Klingle, Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 51; David B. Williams, Too High and Too Steep: Reshaping Seattle’s Topography (Seattle: University of Washington Press), 78.
[2] Coll Thrush, Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007), 106.
[3] Thrush, Native Seattle, 82-83.
[4] Williams, Too High and Too Steep, 78.
[5] Thrush, Native Seattle, 85-86.
Credits and Sources:
Description by Madison Heslop on behalf of the American Society for Environmental History.
Klingle, Matthew. Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.
Thrush, Coll. Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007.
Williams, David B. Too High and Too Steep: Reshaping Seattle’s Topography (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015.
