The Great Northern's Mountain Division Point

In eighteen ninety-two, the Great Northern Railroad began laying track up the Wenatchee Valley toward the Cascade crest at Stevens Pass, and by January of eighteen ninety-three the line was complete, finishing the last section of the transcontinental Great Northern Railway. Leavenworth, sitting at the junction of the Wenatchee and Icicle, was chosen as a division point. The railroad built a roundhouse, a switchyard, and its division headquarters here.

By eighteen ninety-three the new town had grown to roughly seven hundred people and more than forty businesses. The rail connection brought loggers, miners, and eventually fruit growers into the valley. The railroad made Leavenworth, and for a generation its engine noise was the sound of prosperity.

Then in the nineteen twenties the Great Northern rerouted its main line through a new tunnel and moved its division headquarters to Wenatchee, taking the wages and workers with it. What the railroad built, it also dismantled. The town population fell from its boom-era high to about fifteen hundred by the nineteen fifties.

Amtrak still stops at a small station in Leavenworth, the ghost of the division point on the same tracks the Great Northern laid more than a century ago.