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Community Corner

Two Views From The Schoolhouse Roof 12 Decades Apart

Two photos from the same location but separated by 120 years show the incredible changes in the face of Edmonds since its beginnings in the late 19th century.

Edmonds in 1890, the year of its incorporation as a city, was a fledgling settlement of mud, sawdust and tree stumps.

The accompanying photo was taken in the early 1890s from the top of the new school building. Located at Seventh and Main Street and completed in 1891, the school replaced the at Third and Main, which the mushrooming student population had outgrown.

Twenty years earlier, the Edmonds Bowl was a virgin forest of old growth cedar, hemlock and Douglas fir. Professional logger George Brackett first saw it in 1870 and dreamed of founding a logging town to harvest these huge, easily accessible trees. He arrived for good in 1872.

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Brackett couldn't wait to get started. He immediately commenced  of the area, and his at the foot of Bell Street ran day and night converting the logs into lumber. By the time the school was completed in 1891 and the accompanying photo taken, most of the marketable timber had been cleared from the downtown area and on either side of Main Street to the rim of the Edmonds Bowl.

Edmonds was already supporting a growing lumber industry when it officially incorporated as a city in 1890. Population was growing rapidly, workers were bringing families into the area, homes were being built, and the community was rapidly evolving away from its rough-and-tumble logging camp beginnings to a more genteel family community.

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A sign of the times was construction of the , the first dedicated church building in town. Note the church steeple on the left in the first photo.

Eagerly anticipating the imminent and the economic boom that was sure to follow, Edmonds seemed poised on the brink of unprecedented prosperity. Outside investors bought up large tracts of land (mostly from Brackett) and built the (visible in the upper right in the first photo), confident of making a financial killing.

The killing, when it happened, backfired. The recession of 1893 caught many investors overextended, and much of the land reverted to Brackett by foreclosure.

Today the view is very different. The Congregational Church spire is no longer there. The school building from which the first photo was taken is also gone, replaced in 1928 by the new . Closed as a school in 1972, the building serves the community today as the . The present photo was taken from the library patio, and shows pretty much the same view as the original.

In the 120 years separating the two photos, Edmonds has changed dramatically. Indeed, the present day photo is hardly recognizable as the same town.

It makes me wonder how it will look in 2130.

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