Snoqualmie

Moon’s Weir and the Upper Snoqualmie

Snoqualmie stands about 30 miles east of Seattle on the Snoqualmie River, just above Snoqualmie Falls.³ Accounts of the falls’ height differ, from 268 feet in the National Register nomination to 276 feet in an encyclopedia entry.^4,5 In the Snoqualmie story, Moon the Transformer came to the place where the falls now are, found a fish weir of wood that kept the salmon from going upstream, and turned it into a waterfall.⁶ When the Point Elliott Treaty was signed in 1855, the Upper Snoqualmie band lived in multi-family houses on the prairies above the falls.⁴ Chief Patkanim signed that treaty, ceding all of the tribe’s land to the United States, but the tribe was never repaid and never given a reservation.³

Borst, the Kelloggs, and the Hop Ranch

Accounts of the first settlers differ: the 1950 state guide names the Kellogg brothers, who settled on the prairie above the falls in 1858, while a later encyclopedia account says the Kelloggs stayed only a few years.^2,3 Jeremiah Borst, considered the first permanent settler, arrived in 1858 and lived at first in the ruins of Fort Alden, a crude wooden fort built by Washington Territorial Volunteers during the 1855-1856 Indian Wars.¹ Watson Allen opened Snoqualmie’s first mill about 1872 at the mouth of Tokul Creek, just downstream from the falls.¹ In 1882 the Hop Grower’s Association of Seattle brought a hop ranch of 1,500 acres to the valley near the present town, and a settler named Taylor made 20,083 cedar hop poles for it at two cents each.⁷ Many of the pickers were Native Americans who came from all over the Northwest, and around 1900 the ranch failed because of aphid infestations and low hop prices.^3,7

Platting Snoqualmie Falls

The Seattle, Lake Shore & Eastern Railway arrived in 1889, and in August of that year Charles H. Baker, an engineer with the railway, filed the plat of “Snoqualmie Falls.”¹ The first lots are said to have been bought by Edmund and Louisa Kinsey, parents of Darius and Clark Kinsey, who photographed the region’s lumber industry between the mid-1890s and 1940.¹ Four miles away, Will and Mary Taylor had filed a plat on February 16, 1889, naming their townsite Snoqualmie; the railroad asked Taylor to change the name because of the nearby town of Snoqualmie Falls, and his town was finally named North Bend.⁷ The community of Snoqualmie Falls later shortened its own name to Snoqualmie.¹ By 1900 Snoqualmie had 429 residents, and in May 1903 they voted 49 to 20 to incorporate.^1,3 The papers were filed on June 9, 1903, with James Strouf as first mayor, in a town where lots had been priced at $300 since 1889 and many residents had simply built in the rights-of-way of the streets.¹

The Plant in the Rock

Charles H. Baker, out of work after the Panic of 1893, persuaded his father to finance a power generator deep in the rock beneath the falls, and work began in 1898.⁵ Workers cut the cavity with dynamite and pneumatic drills while others hauled the debris up the shaft and sent it by gravity tramway to a rock crusher.⁸ On July 31, 1899, at a public ceremony, Baker’s 18-month-old daughter Dorothy pulled the switch.⁵ The federal engineering record of the plant calls it the first power plant successfully constructed completely underground, and it found all of the original turbines still in use.⁸ In September 1903, while workers were enclosing the transformers in fireproof containers, the oil of an unprotected transformer caught fire; newspaper accounts say the fire destroyed the transformer house and seven of the ten transformers, yet the plant resumed limited operation within twenty-four hours.⁸

Mill Town to Snoqualmie Ridge

In 1917 an all-electric lumber mill opened in the company town of Snoqualmie Falls, just across the river, and it became known as the Weyerhaeuser Mill.^1,7 In 1950 the state guide counted 775 people in a town born in the lumbering boom, with lumbering in the district still employing about 1,800 men, though the logged-over country now sent out more cattle than lumber.² The population grew from 279 in 1910 to 1,216 in 1960 and drifted up to 1,631 by 2000, and some who stayed found work in a Weyerhaeuser plywood plant.¹ Highway 10, built in the 1940s, bypassed Snoqualmie and cost it tourists, and the rail line was abandoned in 1974.³ In 1990 and 1991 the television mystery series Twin Peaks was filmed at locations in Snoqualmie.¹ Later in the 1990s the city annexed 1,300 acres to the west for the planned community of Snoqualmie Ridge, the population grew from 1,631 to 10,670 between 2000 and 2010, and by 2010 more than 80 percent of residents lived on the ridge.¹ Of the company town across the river, the sycamore trees on both sides of Reinig Road are among the last vestiges.⁹