Lake Washington Ship Canal

The Lake Washington Ship Canal links the freshwater lakes east of Seattle to Puget Sound through two man-made cuts and a set of locks at Salmon Bay. Construction ran from 1911 to 1917, and the project lowered Lake Washington by about nine feet — eliminating the Black River entirely in the process. The locks handle roughly a twenty-foot elevation difference between the lake system and the tidal salt water of the Sound. They were officially named for Hiram M. Chittenden in 1956; he was the Army Corps engineer who drove the project through federal approval, though he died in October 1917, just months after the formal opening on the Fourth of July.

The interior photograph features the W. T. Preston, a flat-bottomed stern-wheeler the Corps used as a snagboat — a vessel purpose-built to pull submerged logs and debris from navigable waterways before they could foul propellers or ground smaller boats. Built in 1929 with a steel hull fitted in 1939, the Preston worked the Puget Sound watershed from Olympia to Blaine for over forty years. The brochure calls her "the last large steam-powered vessel operating in Puget Sound," a distinction she held until retirement in 1981. She is now preserved as a National Historic Landmark in Anacortes, Washington.

The contact block at the bottom lists the Corps' Seattle district office at 1519 Alaskan Way South with two phone numbers still printed in the old telephone-exchange format — "MUtual 2-2700" and "SUnset 3-7001" — where the capitalized letters name the exchange that preceded the digits on a rotary dial (MU = 6-8, SU = 7-8). Seattle had already converted to all-number dialing before 1970, making these conventions a mild anachronism on a freshly printed government document. The publication mark "GPO 998-261" in the lower margin identifies this as a U.S. Government Printing Office run, distributed free to the public.