Seattle Ferry Terminal
The best view of Seattle isn’t from the Space Needle or Columbia Tower. The best view of Seattle is from a ferry.
Washington state has the nation’s largest ferry system. Its fleet of twenty-two ferries is a marine highway for both daily commuters and tourists. From the Ferry Terminal at Colman Dock in downtown Seattle, passengers can take ferries either to Bremerton, on the Olympic Peninsula, or to Bainbridge Island.[1]
The Washington State Ferry system originated with the Mosquito Fleet, a group of steam vessels that connected Seattle to other towns around the Puget Sound between the late nineteenth century and World War II. The name Mosquito Fleet came from a (possibly apocryphal) story of a man in an office overlooking Elliott Bay who remarked that all the boat activity looked like a “swarm of mosquitoes.”[2]
The Mosquito Fleet, once essential to commerce and daily life around the Puget Sound, declined with the growth of automobiles and paved highways. Some of the larger vessels found new life as ferries.[3]
[1] “Our Fleet,” Washington State Department of Transportation, accessed August 10, 2016, http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/Ferries/yourwsf/ourfleet/.
[2] Jean Cammon Findlay and Robin Paterson, Mosquito Fleet of South Puget Sound(Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2008), 7.
[3] Findlay and Paterson, Mosquito Fleet, 111.
Credits and Sources:
Description by Madison Heslop on behalf of the American Society for Environmental History.
Findlay, Jean Cammon and Robin Paterson. Mosquito Fleet of South Puget Sound. Images of America. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2008.
WSDOT. “Our Fleet.” Washington State Department of Transportation. Accessed August 10, 2016. http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/Ferries/yourwsf/ourfleet/.
