All Over The Map: Early 20th century artifact plucked from Lake Washington
Nov 22, 2024, 9:51 AM | Updated: 10:27 am
On this week’s edition of All Over The Map for Seattle’s Morning News, we visited a pocket park on Mercer Island along the shores of Lake Washington. It was here where a “rich and creamy” reminder of the island’s history was recently discovered by a pair of divers.
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Franklin Landing is a tiny street-end park on the west side of Mercer Island, essentially opposite Seward Park over on the Seattle side of Lake Washington. A dock at this location was a key piece of the “Mosquito Fleet” transportation infrastructure from the late 19th century to 1940, when the first Lake Washington Floating Bridge (which crossed Mercer Island) opened to vehicle traffic.
KIRO Newsradio was joined early Friday by Matt McCauley. He’s known to many as “Mr. Lake Washington History;” McCauley is an author, historian, underwater explorer and a good friend of Seattle’s Morning News.
Earlier this week, McCauley told KIRO Newsradio that a lot of history is hidden beneath the water just off this little-known spot, including ancient clay ledges and 1,200-year-old intact trees from an ancient forest.
All of that, of course, sounds pretty cool. However, what we invited McCauley to Franklin Landing to tell us about is a more recent artifact from the early 20th century which he and a friend plucked from the lake bottom on a recent dive.
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Feliks Banel: “So Matt, for the radio listeners, give us a picture, kind of a physical description, paint a word picture of what this artifact is that’s in your hand right now.”
Matt McCauley: “Yes, this is an old-style glass milk bottle. It is clear. It is embossed with the name “Kristoferson’s” on the upper half. And the neck of the bottle is bulbous. It has a collection area for cream. So the milk would be in the bottom main reservoir of the bottle, and then in the very top, the cream would collect. And this was a pretty common design in the first half of the 20th century.”
Banel: “So that’s called a cream top bottle. It’s a gorgeous piece of glass workmanship from the early part of the 20th century. So why would it be here off Franklin Landing on Mercer Island, of all places?”
McCauley: “Well, this was a steamer landing called Franklin Landing. It connected a foot-passenger steamer between Mercer Island and Leschi. And going back to the 1890s, there had been a dairy on Mercer Island called Kristoferson’s Dairy that later expanded so by the 1920s and 30s, people would bring their coffee, plates and breakfast down to wait at the steamer landing for the boat to come by. And what probably happened is, after they drained their milk bottle, somebody just tossed it into the lake.”
Banel: “And so it’s been out there for probably 80, 90 years. You’ve dived on this place since the late 70s. Why is Lake Washington sometimes stingy with its treasures, yet, all of a sudden, gives it up on a random day in November 2024?”
McCauley: “The visibility down there is kind of limited, so it’s really easy to swim past stuff and not having seen it. There also a lot of the areas where the bottom is softer, the bottles will sort of hide down below the sediment. So you kind of have to develop a knack of seeing odd little bumps and bulges and knowing to reach down into it with your hand and feel around. And then sometimes you’ll find something down there and, ‘Aha, there’s a bottle that’s been sitting there for 100 years or more.'”
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Banel: “That’s really cool. So the basic premise is here, the thesis is, local history is everywhere. It’s underfoot, it’s underwater, it’s out here on Mercer Island. Thanks Matt McCauley for joining us live at Franklin Landing on Mercer Island.”
Matt McCauley said Kristoferson’s Dairy began on Mercer Island, and then expanded into Seattle with construction of a bottling plant on Rainier Avenue in the 1920s. The company, which dated to the 1890s, was ultimately acquired by the larger Foremost Dairy sometime in the 1950s.
You can hear Feliks Banel every Wednesday and Friday morning on Seattle’s Morning News with Dave Ross and Colleen O’Brien. Read more from Feliks here and subscribe to The Resident Historian Podcast here. If you have a story idea or a question about Northwest history, please email Feliks. You can also follow Feliks on X.
