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 810 Central Ave., Sedro-Woolley, Washington, 98284 Home of the Tarheel Stomp Mortimer Cook slept here & named the town Bug

This photograph of the Burlington Interurban depot shows a typical car of the period.

      The Interurban train/trolley that transported both passengers and freight between Bellingham and Mount Vernon, and between Burlington and Sedro-Woolley from 1912-30 was part of a system that covered Puget sound cities in an early version of mass transit. We explore the background and operation of the system and present the results of our research as well as transcripts of features from newspapers, magazines and books of the day, as well as interviews of some of the principals. Part of the plan for the company was their construction of Dollar Way, a concrete highway from Sterling to Sedro-Woolley, the first paved highway in Skagit county.

      In that happy American interlude between the brass bands of the Nineties and the trenches of World War I, when Tom Swift was every boy's hero and the Wrights were simply bicycle-shop tinkerers, there blossomed the interurban. The big yellow arch-windowed cars alternately rocked along beside dusty rural lanes at a mile a minute and inched around courthouse squares, and in their wake, America found a new mobility. For this purely American invention ushered in an era of cheap, fast, frequent transportation that broke the isolation of the farm, proved a boon to the salesman and created suburbia.
      Traction, as the craze was known, came about overnight; the first true interurban was built in Oregon in 1893, yet by 1917 nearly 10,000 cars rode more than 18,000 miles of intercity electric railways in virtually every state of the Union. And then, after only three decades of usefulness, traction vanished — a victim of the Model T and the paved highway. William D. Middleton has re-created this electric phenomena in The Interurban Era, a splendid 560-photo, 55,000 word, 432-page tribute to an American age that identified the hoot of the interurban's horn and the zing of its trolley pole with all the good things that lay just beyond the next curve.

• List of all stories in this issue about the Stone & Webster Interurban, with links and suggestions for further reading.
  
• We transcribe an article from a 1913 issue of the Mount Vernon Argus that detailed the route of the Interurban. And more Journal research about the birth and demise of the line.
  
• Help us identify mystery photos and caption them, and submit scans of your own photos for Paul Dorpat's new Washington book and our updated Mystery Photos section. Chapter One features Chuckanut drive, the Interurban and Great Northern.
  
• A 1982 article about Andy Loft, "Mr. Interurban," who worked for the company for four decades and spent his retirement decades teaching groups, schools and businesses about the importance of the line.
  
• A schedule for interurban depots and stops and the mileage in between them. Story of the first day of operation in 1912, schedules for the trains and locations of the depots.
  
• Transcripts of newspaper stories from 1906-11 about the planning and construction of the Interurban.
  
• Dollar Way in Sedro-Woolley, the first paved highway in the county, which Stone & Webster built as a demonstration project to earn the right of way for the Interurban.
  
• The trains of the Northwest — stories, photos and links
  

• Warren Wing. To Seattle by Trolley. Edmonds, Washington: Pacific Fast Mail, 1988. Wing is one of our favorite authors. His research and citation is impeccable, his selection of photos and presentation of them enhance the text and he has both a sense of place and time. His research and reference to little known people who made their mark is illustrated in this example: "We are all familiar with the inventions of Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. Yet Frank Sprague, who was their equal, is virtually unknown. Sprague was both an engaging person and an authentic genius. Besides perfecting the electric streetcar his other inventions included the system of multiple unit control that allowed elevated and subway trains to be controlled from a single cab, and the high speed elevator. The reason his name is not as well known today is that the sold his patents to Westinghouse, Otis Elevator and others, he did not insist that his name be associated with the final product. The building of modern skyscrapers, subways and light rail systems would have been impossible without his inventions."
  
• Daniel E. Turbeville III. The Electric Railway Era in Northwest Washington, 1890-1930. Bellingham: Center for Pacific Northwest Studies (WWU) Occasional Paper No. 12, 1979. Turbeville is an Oregon native who received an M.A. in geography from Western Washington University in 1976. He served as map curator at Western and worked with James Scott of the CPNW to produce the Illustrated Inventory of Historic Bellingham Buildings, 1852-1915. His book on the Interurban is a very important resource that we consult several times a month.
  
• William D. Middleton. The Interurban Era. Born in Davenport Iowa, the grandson of the first chief surgeon of the Rock Island Lines, Mr. Middleton is a 1950 engineering graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and did graduate work in engineering and journalism at the University of Wisconsin and then was an engineering officer in the U.S. Navy. He retired in 1993 and lives in Charlottesville Virginia. He has written several books on this topic: The Time of the Trolley (1967), When the Steam Railroads Electrified (1974), From Bullets to BART and The Last Interurbans.
  

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