Bothell City

King County, Washington

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Bothell City Hall is located at 18305 101st Avenue Northeast, Bothell, WA 98011.
Phone: 425‑486‑3256.

Neighborhoods

Beginnings [1]

Growth of Bothell beyond the surveyor's description of a "store, a house and a school," until it became a burgeoning town, took place in the decade after the coming of rails in 1887. Among the early buildings on the site were those of the logging camp with its three long bunkhouses and mess hall with log walls and steeply pitched roofs.

Frame buildings began to go up, one at a time. In 1884 E. W. Allen opened the first store, acquired shortly thereafter by Gerhard Ericksen. There were the Bothells' home and boarding house and John Rodgers' American Hotel with its bar on the ground floor; then there was the railroad station (near the northeast corner of the present intersection of 102nd Avenue NE and East Riverside Drive).

The City of Bothell incorporated in 1909 after David Bothell filed a corrected plat of the Town of Bothell plat that was originally filed in 1893. The area encompassed a little over 450 acres. The city boundaries were not expanded again until after World War I. The environment of the Bothell area had been altered by the clearing of land and logging for commercial purposes. The next major alteration at the end of the pioneer era occurred in 1916 when the Montlake Cut and Chittenden Locks were opened. This caused Lake Washington and the Sammamish River levels to drop eight feet. With this action, all boat service to the city ended. It also had the added consequence of draining the area south of Bothell, the Horse Creek basin, the area between Wayne and Lake Washington, and the entire North Creek Basin.

At the end of the logging era, the town of Bothell transitioned to a center supplying the farming and dairying community, which thrived in the 1920s and 1930s. It also became the crossroads for travel north to Canada, because of the Old Pacific Highway, and east to Stevens and Snoqualmie Passes. In the recently drained North Creek Valley, dairy operations sprang up on the rich peat soils of the old swampland.

  1. Bothell History, www.ci.bothell.wa.us, accessed February, 2011.

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