The Toxic Legacy of Seattle’s Lost Cemetery

Much of the Duwamish River Valley was quiet farmland before industrialization. Between 1911 and 1916, Walter Allen and Frank Perkins operated a photo studio in Georgetown, and documented the life and people of the area. Photograph Courtesy MOHAI

In 1912, gravediggers worked quietly through autumn nights in hard dirt to unearth 3,000 dead people along the Duwamish River

The coffins in this potter’s field belonged to those who were poor, unknown, or didn’t have families to bury them. Loose silt and clay rolled off pine boxes as the diggers lifted the remains out of the ground. 

Then the bodies vanished, and so did the bends of the waterway

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