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Skagit River Journal

of History & Folklore
Subscribers Edition Stories & Photos
The most in-depth, comprehensive site about the Skagit.
Covers from British Columbia to Puget sound. Counties covered: Skagit, Whatcom, Island, San Juan. An evolving history dedicated to the principle of committing random acts of historical kindness

Noel V. Bourasaw, editor (bullet)

810 Central Ave., Sedro-Woolley, Washington, 98284
Home of the Tarheel Stomp (bullet)

Mortimer Cook slept here & named the town Bug

Three railroads and the Woolley triangle

Lorraine Rothenbuhler of the Sedro-Woolley Museum recently found this rare photo of the original Woolley Union Depot, which was located on the famous triangle of the three lines. On the left is the depot itself. On the right is Northern avenue in Woolley. On the corner in the lower right is the infamous Keystone Hotel and bar, where spirits were served and travelers from the depot were serviced. Although the Fairhaven & Southern tracks were ripped up decades ago and Burlington Northern has ripped out the tracks that once led to east to Rockport, the tracks that formed two sides of the triangle are still there.
One wonders why the city of Sedro-Woolley has never turned this into a park for both children and tourists. Instead, the very locus of points for the city is now overgrown with weeds. We are happy, though, that the city is building Hammer Heritage Park on Metcalf street just a block south of the triangle. In the center of the photo, you can see two buildings built on the diagonal. They were on both sides of the F&S line, which crossed both the other lines from the northwest to the southeast on the way to Mortimer Cook's wharf in old Sedro. Photo courtesy of an unnamed, undated 1890s magazine.
We have many more photos like this to share with you and will be posting them over the next few weeks. Can you provide any details of these trains that we can add to the page? Do you have photos or documents you would like to share about your family or the old days here? Please consider emailing the scans as attachments or use regular mail for copies.

You can see the actual triangle in a Darius Kinsey photo at the website of the excerpt from our book in progress, From Bug to the Bughouse. You will also see there the original photo of the F&S depot in old-Sedro, one of the few photos of Mortimer Cook's original village.

For many years, researchers bemoaned the lack of photos of the SLS&E line. Just last year we found this photo of an excursion trip of the line, probably in Snohomish county, taken sometime in the 1890s. This photo appeared in an undated issue of the Sedro-Woolley Courier-Times, which was found in an old scrapbook of the Territorial Daughters Chapter One of Sedro-Woolley, which is now the property of the Skagit County Historical Association Museum in LaConner.

Our Trains section has earned so much attention that we thought you might like to see some special photos of the trains that made Sedro-Woolley famous. Readers are always curious why Sedro and Woolley became the crossroads of the valley. The simple answer is that Seattle interests wanted to build their railroad inland so that north-coast towns would not compete with Elliott Bay.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves. The first standard-gauge train north of Seattle was built by Nelson Bennett and the Fairhaven Land Co. Just 26 miles long, the Fairhaven & Southern [F&S] ran on a diagonal southeast from Fairhaven (now south Bellingham) to the old town of Sedro and opened on Christmas Eve, 1889. That also made the line the first railroad launched in the new state of Washington. Bennett initially planned to extend branches of the line all the way south to Seattle and east across Cascade Pass to connect with James J. Hill's Great Northern. But the Great Northern Cascades route did not materialize. The main freight he envisioned was the coal from mines four miles northeast of Sedro that he bought in 1888. He laid tracks on a wye that extended from the route down to Mortimer Cook's wharf at old Sedro. Originally called the Bennett mines, that would later be named Cokedale because of coking quality of the ore. Eventually, 50 beehive coke ovens would be erected there. His planned branch to Seattle did not materialize either because the Seattle Lake Shore & Eastern [SLS&E] West Coast line beat him to the vital narrow corridor around Lake McMurray in Snohomish county. The coal mines completed a package that attracted Hill just a few years later.
Meanwhile, a third line — the Seattle & Northern [S&N], was building towards Sedro from Ship Harbor, located where the state ferry terminal stands now, a mile west of Anacortes. The Oregon Improvement Co. was behind that line and the owners were also building towards coal mines, which were located on the south side of the river from Hamilton, about eight miles upriver.
Bennett initially had plenty of cash, resulting from his bonus money for building the Stampede Pass tunnel on schedule for the Northern Pacific. The other two lines were each stalled for a year when they ran out of funds. Otherwise they may have beaten Bennett to the punch. Those delays actually led to the downfall of Sedro and the upward rise of P.A. Woolley's company town, for which he broke ground in the spring of 1889.
A railroad and timber developer from Elgin, Illinois, Woolley saw the progress of the last two lines towards the upper Skagit and decided that he would build his sawmill where all three would naturally cross. His hunch was correct and the town of new-Sedro enjoyed a boom of barely a year until Thanksgiving of 1890, when all three lines finally crossed in a triangle near Woolley, which measured about 100 yards on each side. The S&N chugged into town in April 1890, and the SLS&E arrived in Thanksgiving week. You can read about all these trains in the links below. But let us have a look at each of them in their heyday.

Click to photos below:

The F&S
The SLS&E
The S&N
The Washington Magazine 1890 railroad maps of Sedro and Woolley
The Woolley Union Depot on the triangle

This photo from the old Fairhaven Gazette magazine was called "F&S First Day," probably taken in Fairhaven.

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The Seattle & Northern, shown here on its first day arrival in Hamilton in 1891. Over the next ten years the line extended first to Sauk, then finally to Rockport in 1901. Photo courtesy of the Eagles Lodge in Sedro-Woolley.

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This map promoted the town of Sedro and its railroads in an 1890 issue of Washington magazine.

This map promoted the town of Woolley and its railroads in an 1890 issue of the same magazine. Note that the town we now know as Bellingham was still called Whatcom. And to the south, the town we now know of as Arlington was called Haller City, which was on the Stillaguamish river just northeast of the present town. Arlington was boomed in 1891 by the SLS&E Railroad.

Links to train stories for these photos:

Check out our Trains section for stories on many trains of the Northwest plus dozens of links for stories and photos on websites that honor railroads, especially those of the steam kind. Included in this section are these two excerpts from our book in progress, From Bug to the Bughouse.
We are preparing a multi-part story for later this winter that will tell the story of how Anacortes was considered a likely terminus for the Northern Pacific Railroad as early as 1855 and up to the time that Tacoma was chosen in 1873. It was later touted as a terminus for the Union Pacific Railroad in the mid-1880s. Finally, the Seattle & Northern was launched from there to the foothills of the Cascades, beginning in 1890. Like the F&S, this line originally planned to continue far beyond Sedro, but it, too, became part of the Great Northern empire and terminated in Rockport just after the turn of the century. We hope that readers will contribute families memories of these railroads, or copies of photos and documents about them.

Story posted on April 1, 2003, updated on March 30, 2004
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