Bothell: From Brackett's Landing to Main Street

Before Bothell, the Sammamish River here was home to a people who called themselves s-tsah-PAHBSH, or 'willow people,' members of a larger group called hah-chu-AHBSH, 'people of the lake,' and of the Duwamish Tribe. They built cedar longhouses near the north end of Lake Washington and lived on fish, wapato bulbs, berries and waterfowl. Historian David Buerge estimates that they and a related group upriver numbered between 80 and 200 people. [1]

The first settlers filed claims along the river in 1870. In 1876 Canadian lumberman George Brackett bought timber land and floated his logs into the river from its north bank, and his logging camp became Brackett's Landing. In 1885 Brackett sold 80 acres to David Bothell, a Pennsylvanian who took in boarders and, when his house burned, built the Bothell Hotel. Gerhard Ericksen became the local postmaster on May 25, 1888. Asked what to call the post office, he said, 'There are so many Bothells in town and that's a good name, so let's call it Bothell.' [1]

The railroad came in 1888: Daniel Hunt Gilman and Thomas Burke's Seattle, Lake Shore & Eastern, running through Bothell to the coal mines at Issaquah. Its depot was at first a boxcar down the river at Wayne; in 1890 it was loaded onto a flatcar and set down on the south bank at Bothell. Other promoters platted towns called Winsor and Huron that never got past the plat stage. On April 25, 1889, David Bothell filed a plat for the town of Bothell, and the town grew along Main Street and 1st Avenue. [1]

The river was the other road. As early as 1867, farmers took produce to Seattle by boat, in rowboats and scows some of them 50 feet or more long, and a round trip from Issaquah could take 10 days under human power. A steamboat trip from Seattle's Madrona neighborhood to Issaquah took 14 hours, with a meal stop in Bothell. In the 1910s the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers straightened the river's meanders, and in 1917, when the Lake Washington Ship Canal opened and the lake dropped about nine feet, the river stopped mattering for transportation. [1]

Then came the cars. In May 1913 a highway was finished from Seattle through Lake City and Kenmore to Bothell and Everett, with four miles from Kenmore to Bothell surfaced in brick. That same month Bothell's mayor, S. F. Woody, was arrested for exceeding the 12 m.p.h. speed limit on the bridge over the river. He argued in court that there was no instrument to accurately document his speed. The case was dismissed, with a warning from the judge. Ericksen, by then a state legislator and a champion of good roads, also sponsored the Thistle Bill, to clear prickly plants from roadsides where motorists might have to relieve themselves in the dark. [1]

Bothell incorporated on April 14, 1909, and David Bothell's son George was its first mayor. Its population hovered around 600 from 1900 to 1920. After World War II, cars and better highways let people who worked in Seattle, Bellevue or Everett live there, and the completion of Interstate 5 and Interstate 405 sped the shift from farm town to suburb. About 1,000 people lived in Bothell in 1950; over the next 50 years the population passed 25,000. The old railroad line through town, abandoned in 1971, became the Burke Gilman Trail. [1]