Ballard Locks and the Canal That Rewrote the Map

The Hiram M. Chittenden Locks opened in nineteen seventeen after a construction project that had been debated in Seattle since territorial days, decades of argument about whether, and how, to connect the freshwater lakes east of the city to the saltwater of Puget Sound. The answer was a two-chamber lock system at the mouth of Salmon Bay in Ballard, a canal eight miles long, and a decision that changed the geography of an entire watershed.

Lake Washington, before the locks, sat nine feet higher than it does today. The project lowered it by that amount. The engineering consequence of dropping Lake Washington by nine feet was the permanent draining of the Montlake wetlands between the lake and Lake Union, wetlands that the Duwamish people had used for fishing, hunting, and gathering for thousands of years before the settlers arrived. A Duwamish village site was flooded by the new water levels. The canal project did not acknowledge this in its contemporary documentation. The Army Corps of Engineers recorded the engineering. The displacement of the Duwamish use of that landscape was not in the project scope.

What the locks made possible, on the other side of the ledger, was Ballard's economy. The Scandinavian fishing community that had established itself in the district could now move fishing vessels between the Sound and the freshwater harbor at Lake Union without the haul-over that had previously been required. Boat-building on Lake Union became commercially viable at a different scale. The halibut and salmon fleets that would operate out of Seattle and into Alaskan waters for the next century were serviced by the infrastructure the locks created.

The fish ladder at the base of the locks was added later; it was not part of the original design. In late summer, you can stand at the viewing window and watch Chinook salmon navigating it, moving from salt to fresh water to spawn in the same rivers their ancestors used before the canal existed. The fish do not care about the engineering. They are following something older.