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| Boats, both pleasure and commercial, now dominate a Ballard waterfront that for most of its life was a packed strip of lumber mills. |
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| PAUL DORPAT |
IF MEMORY SERVES, this is the fourth photograph by Ballardian James Turner that has been used in this column through its first 20 years. Turner revealed a zest in his work by managing to join his vocation — he was a trolley motorman for the Seattle Municipal Railways — with his avocation — he loved to take pictures, especially of trolleys. Of course, this moody landscape is an exception, although it, like the old trolleys, is informed by the sensibilities of the Industrial Revolution.
After a brief beginning as a farming and fishing community in the late 1880s, Ballard soon surrendered most of its Salmon Bay waterfront to lumber mills. By 1907, the year Ballard was annexed to Seattle, more than a dozen mills were operating between the old 14th Avenue bridge (precursor to the 15th Avenue bridge) and the future site of the Chittenden Locks. Most of the community boat building had been pushed farther west and nearer Shilshole Bay. Although this photograph was recorded most likely in the 1940s, the effluvia of the Ballard sky — especially when captured as here with its sources in silhouette — can still suggest an infernal scene.
James Turner has pointed his camera to the southeast from the old sawdust heart of the Ballard waterfront. On the far right, part of the timber approach to the center section of the Ballard Bridge is evident. The distant drying stack in the center is either part of the old Bolcom Mill that sat just west of the bridge or contiguous to the west part of the Seattle Cedar Mill, once the largest mill of its kind in the world. In 1958 most of that mill was destroyed in one of Seattle's great fires. While the mill was rebuilt, ultimately it closed for want of cedar. The contemporary photograph looks into the Ballard Mill Marina that replaced the cedar mill and its sulfuric effects in the 1980s.
Paul Dorpat specializes in historical photography and has published several books on early Seattle.
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