Even though Burien incorporated in 1993, there has been a Highline
community that incorporated the Burien area since the late nineteenth
century. The first road in the area was a rough wagon road, the Military
Road, built by the US Army from Fort Steilacoom through Seattle and on
to Bellingham in 1860. Settlers created branches off this road to their
properties. Burien still contains several neighborhoods that developed
from homesteads settled along Military Road.
The roads through the
area were eventually dubbed the High Line or Highline Highway as a
counterpoint to the “low” or “valley” roads to the east. They served as
an important connector between Seattle and Tacoma. The name Highline
has been used since for this portion of southwestern King County.
Most
Burien neighborhoods were agricultural during the early decades of
settlement, but beach communities on Puget Sound and Lake Burien's
shoreline became summer destinations for wealthy Seattle residents in
the first decades of the twentieth century. While the beach communities
had regular service by Puget Sound steamboats, from 1912 to 1929 people
in the inland areas relied on the private Highland Park & Lake
Burien railway, “the Toonerville Trolley,” for transportation to and
from Seattle.
The residential population began to increase during
World War I and has continued to rise steadily since due to The Boeing
Company and associated subcontractors and Seattle-Tacoma International
Airport being located nearby.
For millennia, Lushootseed-speaking
peoples, such as the Duwamish and Muckleshoot, had occasional
encampments on land now occupied by the City of Burien.
Local
waterways were navigable by canoe, and tribal members had separate
summer fishing camps, hunting grounds, and plant-collecting areas. Along
the shore of what they called "Salt Water" (Puget Sound), people spent
summers fishing, hunting, trading, and later working in the businesses
that grew up in the area. The woods, teeming with wildlife, were hunting
grounds. The bogs were full of cranberries. Trails between the
Duwamish, Black, White, and Green Rivers and Puget Sound were well-used.
Puget
Sound Native Americans had used what is today called Three Tree Point
as a summer camp, trading area, and hunting ground. Early settlers
recalled canoes pulled up on the sand and fish drying on racks on the
beach.
Burien’s Origin Story
Every city has an origin
story, and Burien is no exception. The story goes that Michael Kelly
(1852-1916), son of settlers in the Duwamish River valley, climbed the
daunting hill west of the confluence of the Black and Duwamish rivers,
expecting to see Puget Sound. What he saw instead was a heavily wooded
old-growth forest and a beautiful valley, a place he eventually called
Sunny dale. Kelly wanted to homestead there with his bride-to-be,
Elizabeth Jane Fenton (1853-1931), but to do that he needed to be 19
years old and clear 160 acres of land. He obtained a permit cleared the
land, and moved into a log cabin on their homestead on April 1, 1873.
The adjoining wagon track initiated by local settlers leading through
the woods and down the hill to the Duwamish River eventually became
known as Des Moines Memorial Drive. The area, now near the center of
Burien, was called Sunnydale for decades.
Lake Burien, a 44-acre,
spring-fed glacial lake, was named after Gottlieb Burian (1837-1902) and
his wife, Emma Worm Burian (1840-1905). The Burians came to the United
States from Lower Silesia, Prussia (now part of Poland). They arrived in
the Washington Territory in about 1874 and moved to Seattle in about
1876. The Burians began to make a second home for their family in
Sunnydale in 1884, and in 1889 they purchased a 120-acre homestead at
the southeast corner of the lake, later named for them. (There appears
to be no record explaining how the "a" in "Burian" was changed to an
"e"). While earlier homesteaders in the area had worked hard to make a
living from the land, the Burians were suburban landowners, keeping a
home in Seattle and living as a prosperous tavern owner, but spending
holidays and summers with their family near the lake.
Early Transportation
Mike
Kelly's road led to the adjoining Henry Burton property; it was
extended by other settlers to what became 188th Street. The road then
wandered toward the Sound to Normandy Park and to the George Gardner
homestead. It wound along the beach to Stone Landing at Crescent Beach,
and eventually reached Des Moines. The Kelly Road swung up the hill from
about South 146th to the John Bissell place and then wound south as far
as South 160th. The road then took off to the east side of Lake Burien.
This
wandering, branching road created by the settlers in the 1870s and
1880s was the basis for what became the Des Moines Road. The Des Moines
Road and the extended 1st Avenue S, which ran from Seattle's waterfront
to S 160th, were cedar-puncheon roads and provided access to markets in
Seattle for products from the south until about 1900, when King County
began more active public road building.
While highways connected
inland areas, the Puget Sound "Mosquito Fleet" of small steamships
served the beach communities of Des Moines, Three Tree Point, and
Crescent Beach with connections to Seattle, Tacoma, and Olympia.
The Highline Road
By 1903, King County was at work improving the roads in south King County.
The Riverton Drawbridge was built across the Duwamish in 1903, taking
the place of the ferry service. Jacob Ambaum (c. 1866-1935) was hacking
roads through the thick growth in northern Sunnydale (now White Center).
The road that came to be named for him first appears in King County
records in 1909, and was graveled beginning in 1910. Many other roads
were developed and improved in the area.
In July 1915 a new
"scenic highway" linking Seattle and Tacoma, called the High Line
(officially, Bond Road No. 12), was dedicated. The Seattle Times described the road in an illustrated account of an automobile test drive on the new highway:
"The
new road ... is a splendid piece of work, being wide, well graveled and
offering a maximum gradient of 4 per cent. This is in marked contrast
to the narrow and precipitous course of the old McKinley Hill route,
which in the early days of Washington was utilized primarily as a
military highway" ("New Road to Tacoma ... ").
The new High Line road was also referred to in Seattle Times articles
and in King County road documents as the "Highline Road" -- a variation
that distinguished King County's Highline area from "High Line" areas
near Mount Vernon in Skagit County, and in Montana, Idaho, and
elsewhere. "Highline" came to be the name adopted for much of
southwestern King County, as the road connected many towns in the area.
The name was used for Highline High School, built in 1924 in Sunnydale
(now Burien), as well as the unified Highline School District, created
in 1941, which continues to offer services throughout King County's
Highline area.
Many parts of the 1915 Seattle-to-Tacoma Highline
Road were based on the older Des Moines Road. Portions of the road from
South Park to Des Moines were specially planted, beginning in 1921, with
trees and shrubs as a memorial to World War I veterans. The road was
later designated as Des Moines Memorial Drive.
Beach Communities
During
the 1890s, real-estate developers explored beach communities with
beautiful views of Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains for sites for
summer homes. In 1895 the Schwabacher brothers, longtime Seattle
merchants, and Bailey Gatzert (1829-1893) bought land at Three Tree
Point (called Point Pully on navigation charts).
James D. Lowman
(1856-1947); Bernard Pelly (1860-1938), who served as Great Britain's
vice consul in Seattle; and Charles B. Livermore (1849-1914)—all Seattle
businessmen associated through Lowman and Hanford Printing and
Stationery Company and its successors—formed the Three Tree Point
Company. They bought 267 acres with 2.5 miles of waterfront at the point
in 1902, and began formal development of a summer resort. Opening in
July 1903, the private resort offered accommodations for picnicking,
camping, and hunting along the waterfront, accessible by steamer from
Seattle and Tacoma. Summer-home sites also went on sale. The first of
the summer homes was built by Linden Irwell Gregory (1876-1946) in 1902,
and many followed.
For a decade or more, residents of Seattle and
Tacoma relied on steamship service to reach the beach community. No
road was built to connect the point with the Lake Burien area until
1915.
A.F. Pope, W.C. Talbot, and Cyrus Walker purchased most of
what is now Seahurst Park on May 15, 1869. Walker was a lumber mill
manager on the Kitsap Peninsula. William C. Talbot, of Maine, and his
partner, Andrew J. Pope, built a steam sawmill at Port Gamble on Hood
Canal. The mill operated for 142 years—longer than any other in the
U.S.—from 1853 to 1995. Pope & Talbot was a major forest products
enterprise in Western Washington throughout the 20th century.
The
area now known as Seahurst Park was a popular picnic spot in the early
1900s. Charles Hughes, an early Burien resident, recalled: “After the
berries were picked and the hay gathered in, his folks would take the
kids to the beach in a wagon. No one lived from Salmon Creek to Three
Tree Point, so campsites were plentiful.” They picked wild berries, dug
clams, and caught fish from driftwood rafts.
In 1915, the Seahurst
Land Company owned 200 acres from 16th SW to Puget Sound, north of SW
152nd St. This parcel contained 12 to 14 springs, many of them in
Seahurst Park. Pumps, used to get the water into small tanks, were
installed near SW 142nd St. and 21st Ave SW.
World War II brought
new homes to the area served by the springs. This led to larger pumps
and tanks, which were moved to SW 146th St. Several of the springs, as
well as the remains of a pumping station and pipes, can still be found
in the area.
In the early 1900s, a portion of the park
land became the Fox family estate. There was a merry-go-round on the
property. Robert Fox, one of the Fox children, eventually owned the Ford
dealership on 146th and First Ave. S.
In the 1950s, Howie Gwinn
and others planned to develop the Hurstwood community. At the last
minute, King County Parks, through Commissioner Ed Munro, acquired
Gwinn's property, plus the adjoining parcel, for a total of 2,000 feet
of waterfront. Munro found the money to buy the Seahurst Park land by
selling the Burien Fieldhouse site to Westside Federal Bank for use as a
headquarters.
Real Estate and the Trolley
In the early
twentieth century, local landowners pooled their resources and purchased
an electric street car from Seattle. The line began at Riverside, where
it made connections with Seattle Trolley lines. They established a new
rail line was called the Highland Park & Lake Burien Railway. It
crossed through White Center and continued through thick forest to 152nd in Burien, and west to Seahurst. A freight spur continued south for several blocks from 152nd for the use of merchants or contractors needing to move large amounts of materials to the rapidly developing area.
Service
began in 1912 but was interrupted by a large landslide at Riverside
Avenue and Ninth Avenue SW on November 8 of that year. In 1914 the line
was given to the Seattle Municipal Railway Company, and service was
restored that May. Through-service to and from Seattle began on
September 4, 1919, when an elevated line along Spokane Street and
Railroad Avenue was opened to traffic. The nine-mile line initiated at
Lake Burien and eventually grew to 14.14-mile line, carrying both
passengers and freight. As automobile use increased, through-service to
Lake Burien and Seahurst was suspended in 1929, and in 1931 the line was
decommissioned.
A Diverse Community
Sunnydale and the
Lake Burien area continued to be largely agricultural until World War
II. Families who came to farm often stayed, and their descendants can
still be found in the area. Among them were a number of Japanese
families who came first to Seattle and then moved south to farm, at
least for part of their livelihood. Starting with small farms as early
as 1906, many of the area's Japanese-American families came to own
nurseries and greenhouses, and a few became well known as flower
arrangers as well as gardeners.
Hosoe Kodama (1894-2006) was known
throughout Washington and in Japan for founding the U.S. chapter of the
Ikenobo School of Japanese Flower Arranging and, in 1961, Burien's
Chitose-an Tea Ceremony School. She taught for many years in both Burien
and Seattle, and she and her arrangements were often on hand for Bon
Odori festivals at the Seattle Buddhist Church and for the weekly
installation of a fresh flower arrangement at the Seattle Art Museum
(now the Seattle Asian Art Museum) in Volunteer Park. Hosoe and Kinsuke
(1887-?) Kodama ran a greenhouse business and raised five children in
Burien, and their descendants, along with those of many other
Japanese-American families, still live in the area.
The Ruth School for Girls
The
Ruth School for Girls (largely unwed mothers) was founded in 1921 on
the site of the Girls Parental School at 3404 E (now NE) 68th Street in
Seattle's Ravenna neighborhood. It was inspired by the ongoing pleas of
Judge King Dykeman (1874-1931), who served on the King County Superior
Court bench from 1911 until he retired in 1925.
Among his judicial
duties, Judge Dykeman took charge of the King County Juvenile Court in
1913 and carried on a long-term campaign to improve conditions for the
court's young charges. He felt a need for a school (and home) for girls
who were wards of the court, and this was the charge of the Ruth School
at the time. On June 4, 1933, the new home of the Ruth School for Girls
was dedicated at "Holly Hedge" on the shore of Lake Burien. The
purchase of the former George W. Albee residence the previous fall had
been funded by a bequest, and renovation was undertaken by a number of
Seattle women who donated both time and money to make the move possible.
The judge named the school after his young daughter Ruth, who joined
him at the founding meeting of the home in March 1921.
Over the
years, the focus of the school changed, and the Ruth Dykeman Children's
Center (RDCC) offered a variety of services for stressed children and
their families. On November 25, 2010, RDCC merged with Navos, remaining
at its location in Burien and retaining its residential program and
name.
In 2012, Navos and RDCC merged with the Seattle Children's
Center and work began to implement the merger and improve the Burien
campus.
Supporting Aviation
The Boeing Company began to
build airplanes in 1915 in a small shop on Lake Union in Seattle.
Successful, as it has been since, the company moved its plant to the old
Heath Shipyards on the Duwamish tide flats in 1917.
Not only did
Boeing provide employment (800 workers in 1917, increasing to 100,000
during World War II in the Tukwila and Renton plants), in the early
decades it used a great deal of lumber. The Highline area of southwest
Seattle and King County provided timber both for the airplane industry
and for the shipbuilding industry along the Duwamish River turned
industrial waterway.
As air transport began to supplant water
transport, the Port of Seattle located a new airport at Bow Lake.
Officially dedicated as Seattle-Tacoma International Airport in 1949,
the airport grew significantly over time and is now the busiest in the
Pacific Northwest. From the 1930s onward, the Burien area has provided
housing, along with businesses and services, for many who work in the
airplane, airline, and airport industries.
Expansions of Sea-Tac
Airport were among the reasons that several unincorporated areas in
southwest King County chose to incorporate, with the City of Normandy
Park doing so in 1953 and the City of SeaTac in 1990. Voters in those
areas hoped that incorporation would give them more of a voice in
airport-expansion decisions.
Incorporation and Annexation
Sea-Tac
Airport's growth, and plans for a third runway, also helped inspire
Burien residents to incorporate after repeatedly rejecting proposals to
form a city. On the fifth attempt, the City of Burien was officially
incorporated on February 28, 1993, as a noncharter code city with a
council-manager form of government. The estimated population at the time
was 27,700 within the incorporated area of about nine square miles. The
boundaries of the new city were: north -- SW 128th Street, 12th Avenue
SW, and SW 116th Street; south -- Normandy Park; east -- Des Moines
Memorial Drive; and west -- Puget Sound. The incorporation vote, held on
March 10, 1992, was about two-to-one in favor.
Since
incorporation, Burien has pursued annexation of adjacent neighborhoods,
often successfully. In early May 2009, both King County and the City of
Burien passed resolutions to place an annexation vote on the August 18
primary ballot. The annexation area voted on consisted of southern North
Highline and had an area of about 1,600 acres and approximately 14,000
residents. The ballot issue was approved by a majority of southern North
Highline residents, and on April 1, 2010, southern North Highline
became part of Burien. After the annexation vote, a special census was
conducted, and it was determined that the newly annexed area had 14,292
residents. This resulted in a new population total of 49,858, making
Burien the 23rd largest city in Washington.
Recent Historical Milestones
1993 February 28, Incorporation Day
1995 Groundbreaking and dedication of Lake Burien Memorial Park
1997 City assumes ownership of King County parks properties in Burien City’s first
Comprehensive Plan adopted
1998 Annexation of 2,500 residents of Manhattan & Woodside park areas Park Board &
Arts Commission formed
2000 Downtown Town Square Task Force begins meeting to plan a Town Square first
annual outdoor concert series held at Lake Burien School Park
2001 Burien’s Skate Park opens
2002 Work begins on SW 152nd Street improvement project
2003 Broadcasting of Burien City Council meetings begins
2004 City Council begins study of possible annexation of North Highline area
Conceptual site plan for 20-acre Town Square development approved
2005 Work completed on removal of south seawall and beach restoration at Seahurst
Park
Dedication ceremony held for Burien’s Eagle Landing Park
2006 Dedication ceremony for Mathison park, first park development east of 1st Ave S.
Groundbreaking of Town Square Park
City Hall moves to new temporary location on Ambaum Boulevard SW
2007 Jacob Ambaum Park opens on Ambaum Boulevard SW
Demolition of former Gottschalk store marks beginning of construction of Burien
Town Square
2008 City initiates new economic development initiative to build on the “cluster” of
medical service providers in Burien
City adopts biennial budget process
2009 New City Hall and Library opens
Town Square Park opens
Radio-free Burien begins broadcasting
Groundbreaking of South Correctional Entity Regional Jail (SCORE)
Burien Interim Art Space has year-long run
Work completed on phase one of 1st Ave S. improvement project
2010 Public Works maintenance crews brought in-house
Community Center opens in newly remodeled former library
Burien contracts to begin Burien Animal Care and Control
Annexation of 14,000 Highline residents
2011 SCORE Regional Jail opens
City Council develops, adopts Vision for Burien
Metro/Sound Transit parking garage opens downtown
City’s major arterials are resurfaced
Work begins on phase two on 1st Ave S. improvement project
2012 Community Animal Resource and Education Society (C.A.R.E.S.) opens in Burien
2013 Phase two of 1st Ave S. improvement project completed
Work begins on Seahurst Shoreline Restoration Project, north seawall removal
Burien becomes a Safe Place City
Arbor Day Foundation names Burien a 2012 Tree City USA
2014 Seahurst Restoration Project concludes and receives Livable Communities Award
for “Overall Excellence in Protecting Natural Resource Area”
2015 NERA Stormwater Facility and Miller Creek Greenway Project Phase One concludes
King Country Metro Transit opens shuttle in Burien
Ground breaks on Merrill Garden developments to complete Town Square
Burien Magazine launches
2017 Town Square complete with construction of Maverick Apartments and Merrill Garden complex.
2018 City celebrates its 25th anniversary of incorporation.