At Home in King County: Images from the Collections

Health, safety, recreation and transportation are some of the topics that appear in these photographs. Please click on the thumbnails at the right for larger images and descriptive text. Links in the captions lead to other pages that are part of the King County Archives Web site. There, you'll find more photographs, maps, drawings and additional text information.

This online exhibit, prepared in honor of Washington State Archives Month 2008, is based on a display ("A Baker's Dozen: Images of King County from the Collections") originally created in 2003 by Assistant Archivist Helice Koffler.

Winter in the watershed

The Cedar River is one of the sources of the City of Seattle's drinking water. Following recommendations made in a 1924 report, the city embarked on an ambitious program of improvements to the Cedar River watershed. To this end, Camp 1 was established, initially to provide living quarters for workers assigned to clear driftwood out of Cedar (now Chester Morse) Lake. By the end of 1933, the federal Civil Works Administration (CWA) had sponsored several projects in the watershed. Some of the two hundred CWA workers were also housed at the Cedar Lake camp. The administration of this work program was taken over by the Federal Transient Service later the following year and continued on into 1935. This 1935 photograph most likely shows a member of the Seattle Health Department's sanitary inspection team, Mr. McLaughlin, at Camp 1. The King County Archives holds numerous additional photographs relating to water quality monitoring activities in the Cedar River watershed.

Seattle-King County Department of Public Health photograph files (Series 275), Box 1 (Photo ID 90.2.0880).