Reginald Heber Thomson (1856-1949)

Home , Ballard Locks, Cedar River (Washington), Lake Washington, Montlake Cut, Walt Crowley

It takes more than a good resume to get a government contract.

From: “Illustrated History of the State of Washington”1

. H. THOMSON, Civil Engineer of the city of Seattle, Washington, is one of the progressive Rand enterprising young men of the Northwest. As such it is fitting that some personal mention be made of him in this work.

R.H. Thomson was born in Hanover, Indiana, in 1856, son of Samuel H. and Sophronia (Clifton) Thomson, natives of Kentucky. The Thomson family originated in Scotland. William C. Thomson went from Glasgow about 1720 to Donegal county, Ireland, from whence his son, James Thomson, and his family emigrated to this country in 1771 and settled in Franklin County, Pennsylvania. From that place their descendants spread out over the United States, some of them being farmers and others ministers, lawyers, doctors and engineers. The Cliftons are descended from French Huguenots, who came to this country at an early day. Samuel H. Thomson was a scientist and educator, and for thirty-two years was Professor of Astronomy and Mathematics at Hanover College, covering the period from 1844 to 1876. During this period there were conferred upon him the honorary degrees of A.M., Ph. P. and LL. D. He resigned his position there in 1876, and the following year came to California and settled at Healdsburg, where for four years he conducted the Healdsburg Institute. He died in 1882, in the seventieth year of his age. Figure 1. Reginald Heber His widow is still living, having reached her seventy-third year. Thomson, 1907. They had nine children, four of whom are now living, the subject of our sketch being the youngest son.

Mr. Thomson was educated in the Hanover College, where he graduated in 1877 receiving at graduation the degree of A.B., and more recently the degree of A.M. Engineering

1 Hines, H. K., “An Illustrated History of the State of Washington”: containing a history of the State of Washington from the earliest period of its discovery to the present time, together with glimpses of its auspicious future, illustrations and full page portraits of some of its eminent men and biographical mention of many of its pioneers and prominent citizens of today: Chicago: Lewis Publishing Co. 1893.

Copyright 2008 Jerry Olson October 11, 2008 had been a specialty in his course of study. He came to California with his parents in 1877, and taught in the mathematical department of the Healdsburg Institute until 1881. That year he came to Seattle, arriving here September 26, the city at that time comprising a population of about 3,500. Mr. Thomson found employment in the office of F.H. Whitworth, City and County Surveyor, and in 1882 entered into partnership with him under the firm name of Whitworth & Thomson. They conducted a general line of engineering in railroad, milling and city work. From August 1884, until August, 1886, Mr. Thomson was City Engineer, and during that time drew the plans for the construction of the Union street sewer. This was the first sewer constructed in Seattle on thoroughly modern principles, and has been the pattern for much subsequent work. He also drew plans for and superintended the construction of the Grant street bridge, which is a roadway twenty-six feet wide and two miles long, built on trestle across the tide flats south of the city, connecting the city with the manufacturing districts.

In December, 1886, the firm of Whitworth & Thomson dissolved, and Mr. Thomson became the locating engineer of the Seattle, Lake Shore & Eastern Railroad, filling that position until March, 1889. The country was rough, in many places making railroad work almost impossible, but his lines were adopted on many miles of main line west of the mountains. In March, 1888, he went to Spokane Falls, on the eastern division of the road, and located the two crossings of the Spokane River, and the line of road through that city, and also had charge of the construction of that part of the road, and of the depot and terminals. With the completion of that work he returned to Seattle and organized the engineering firm of R.H. Thomson & Co. After one year the firm changed to Thomson & White, continuing in a general line of work. In 1890 Mr. Thomson was appointed United States Deputy Mineral Surveyor for Figure 2. Reginald Heber Thomson. Washington, giving particular attention to the iron deposits of the Cascade Mountains. In June, 1891, he was appointed County Surveyor, which position he resigned in May, 1892, to accept the appointment of City Engineer of Seattle, the partnership of Thomson & White being dissolved at this time. As City Engineer he has had under construction two sewer tunnels, each one mile long, connecting the interior valleys with the bay. These tunnels were exceedingly difficult to handle, running as they did through material of a glacial deposit consisting of clay intermixed with water, gravel and quicksand, at a depth of 135 to 285 feet under cover. These works have

In 1883 Mr. Thomson was married, in California, to Miss Addie, daughter of James Laughlin, one of the first settlers of Sonoma County. They have two children, James Harrison and Marion.

He is a member of no societies, but is a devoted believer in the doctrine of the Presbyterian Church, as were his forefathers for many generations.

From: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Reginald Heber Thomson (usually R.H. Thomson; 1856 – January 7, 1949) was a self-taught American civil engineer. He worked in Washington State, mainly in Seattle, where he became city engineer in 1892[1] and held the position for two decades. Alan J. Stein wrote that Thomson "probably did more than any other individual to change the face of Seattle" and was responsible for "virtually all of Seattle's infrastructure". [2] Despite the scope of his work, no major portion of Seattle's infrastructure has ever carried Thomson's name. He was supposed to have been memorialized by the R.H. Thomson Freeway, proposed in 1960 but never built.[1][3] Among his achievements were the railway route through Snoqualmie Pass, the Lake Washington Ship Canal, much of the paving of Seattle's roads and sidewalks, numerous bridges over rivers and valleys, and major improvements to Seattle's sewer system, as well as straightening and deepening the Duwamish River and developing the Cedar River watershed, now one of Seattle's major sources of drinking water. He was also responsible for much of the regrading of Seattle, taking down hills and filling in the mudflats[1] and played a major role in the creation of Seattle City Light (the public electric utility), the Port of Seattle, and the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks. Elsewhere, he consulted on projects such as the Rogue River Valley Irrigation Canal, water development for Bellingham, Washington, and power plants in Southeastern Alaska.[2]

Early life

Born and raised in a "Scottish colony" in Hanover, Indiana, Thomson received a Ph.D. in philosophy from Hanover College in 1877. After working as a surveyor, he followed his father to the Healdsburg Institute (later Pacific Union College) in Oakland, California, where his father served as principal and Thomson as a mathematics teacher.[2] Thomson accompanied T.B. Morris to what was then the Washington Territory, now Washington State, where Morris planned to start a coal mine. He arrived September 25, 1881, 30 years to the day after the Denny Party, usually considered the city's founders. The day of his arrival, he

Copyright 2008 Jerry Olson October 11, 2008 met pioneer David Denny at a memorial service for the recently assassinated U.S. president, James Garfield.[2] As an assistant to city and county surveyor F.H. Whitworth, Thompson was involved in the initial surveying and dredging of what would, years later, become the Montlake Cut of the Lake Washington Ship Canal. In 1884 he became the city surveyor, in which capacity he oversaw the building of Seattle's first sewers and the Grant Street bridge across the Duwamish River tideflats.[2] In 1886 he resigned to work for the Seattle, Lake Shore & Eastern railroad, for whom he plotted the route from the northern end of Lake Washington (now Kenmore) east through Snoqualmie Pass to Lake Keechelus. Before returning to become a consulting engineer in Seattle, he spent some time in Spokane, near the state's eastern border, where he was responsible for several railway terminals and two bridges. [2] Seattle city engineer

The regrades

In 1892, three years after the Great Seattle Fire, he became Seattle city engineer and began the process of paving roads, building sidewalks, and adding sewer lines (often through areas that earlier engineers could not work out how to plumb). With his assistant, George F. Cotterill, he laid out Lake Washington Boulevard, initially conceived as a path for bicycles.[2] From the time of his arrival in Seattle, Thomson had considered the hilly landscape and the extensive mudflats as obstacles to the city's growth. He launched several regrading projects, most notably the extensive Denny Regrade, but also the Jackson Regrade (between Main and Judkins Streets and 4th and 12th Avenues) and the regrading of Dearborn Street, with the 12th Avenue Bridge (now Jose P. Rizal Bridge) spanning Dearborn and connecting First Hill to Beacon Hill. He also drove Westlake Avenue through from Downtown to Lake Union, the first flat route connecting the two. He also worked with railroad magnate James J. Hill to get the Great Northern Railway to bypass the already crowded waterfront with a 1906 railway tunnel under Downtown. [2] Regrading 25 miles of streets displaced 16 million cubic yards of dirt, which provided fill for the Duwamish River tideflats. The latter became Seattle's industrial zone.[2] Utilities

When Thomson became city engineer, Seattle was still pumping its water supply from Lake Washington to a reservoir on Beacon Hill. Water supply was beginning to limit the city's growth; with great difficulty, Thomson convinced the city to pipe in water from the Cedar River Watershed, 30 miles to the southeast of Seattle in the Cascade foothills. A December 24, 1900 test of the system went so well that it went into routine use 18 days later, filling the reservoir in City Park, renamed that same year as Volunteer Park. [2] The Cedar River did not supply Seattle only with water: the City Light Cedar Falls hydroelectric plant began operation October 4, 1904; from January 10, 1905, Seattle had electric

With the city council's encouragement, Thomson took a half-year vacation and traveled Europe. It turned out to be a working trip: he studied the infrastructures of the great European cities, and came back with further visions for the future of Seattle. Among the resulting projects were the re-routing of Seattle's sewage outlet to West Point in Magnolia, then part of Fort Lawton, now part of Discovery Park;[2] to this day, the site contains a major sewage treatment plant. [4] Later life

Overlapping his tenure as city engineer, Thomson was president of the University of Washington board of managers (1905-1915). He also became increasingly interested in Seattle's waterways, which led him to resign as city engineer in 1911 to lobby the state legislature and otherwise help organize the Port of Seattle, for which he became chief engineer.[2][5] Among his achievements for the port were the acquisition of Smith Cove and the land at the foot of Bell Street which is now home to the Port's headquarters. He was also largely responsible for dredging and straightening the Duwamish River delta, and for obtaining federal money for the Ballard Locks, now the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks.[2] From 1916 to 1922, Thomson served on the Seattle city council,[6] while continuing to work as a civil engineer. After leaving the council, he continued working various places in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. He consulted on Oregon's Rogue River Valley Irrigation Canal; built hydroelectric plants in Eugene, Oregon and surveyed plant sites in Southeastern Alaska; planned the water supply of Bellingham, Washington and consulted on the system for Wenatchee; briefly, in his seventies, he returned, temporarily, as Seattle city engineer in 1930 to finish the Diablo Dam on the Skagit River[2] after the death of city engineer William D. Barkhuff;[7] consulted to the Inter-County River Improvement Commission for King and Pierce Counties (the counties containing Seattle and Tacoma, respectively), and consulted on the construction of the Lake Washington Floating Bridge (now Lacey V. Murrow Memorial Bridge, carrying Interstate 90 across Lake Washington) and for the foundations of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.[2] At the end of his life, Thomson wrote an autobiography, “That Man Thomson,” which was published posthumously.[2][8] Legacy

In a sense, Thomson's chief legacy is the physical contours of the city of Seattle as it exists today, including the lay of the land, the transportation system, and the municipal utilities.

Thomson was, without a doubt, Seattle's most important city engineer; in 1911 he had served in the office 19 of the 37 years it had existed. He was also often one of the most controversial: in February 1894, less than two years into his second period in the office, the Board of Public Works removed him from office; mayor James T. Ronald removed two members of the Board

Copyright 2008 Jerry Olson October 11, 2008 and reinstated Thomson.[9] A technical man with a streak of imagination... his disdain for those who did not share his vision also made him many enemies.[10[ Some of Thomson's projects remain controversial to this day. The Denny Regrade, his largest regrading project, sluiced away 6 million cubic yards of earth and numerous buildings, including the landmark Washington Hotel. Owners who didn't willingly sell were left with their buildings standing uselessly on pinnacles, the remaining land removed around them. The project was supposed to make way for a northward growth of downtown, but voters rejected Virgil Bogue's plan to rebuild the area in Beaux-Arts style was rejected by the voters in 1912, leaving the area to develop piecemeal.[10] As late as the 1970s, the neighborhood was merely "serviceable but seedy", then increasingly a center of Seattle's bohemian life, while also seeing a growth in condominium and office development.[11][12] Memorials

The R.H. Thomson Freeway

As remarked above, Thomson was supposed to have been memorialized by the R.H. Thomson Freeway,[1] which was scheduled to have run north from Interstate 90, through the Central District, Montlake and the Washington Park Arboretum, under Union Bay, and through Ravenna to an interchange with a proposed Bothell Freeway. In 1972, voters rejected the project, which the City Council definitively abandoned in 1977.[3] Broadview-Thomson Elementary School

He is, however, memorialized by a school: the Broadview-Thomson Elementary School

(originally a junior high school) in Seattle's Broadview / Bitter Lake neighborhood.[13] Notes

1. Ross Anderson, "Earthmovers", Seattle Metropolitan magazine, May 2006, p. 63 2. Alan J. Stein, Thomson, Reginald Heber (1856-1949) (http://www.historylink.org/essays/output.cfm?file_id=2074), HistoryLink essay 2074, January 18, 2000. Accessed online April 14, 2007. 3. David Wilma, Seattle City Council cancels R. H. Thomson Expressway on June 1, 1977 (http://www.historylink.org/essays/output.cfm?file_id=2446), HistoryLink essay 2446, May 22, 2000. Accessed online April 14, 2007. 4. David Wilma, Secondary treatment of sewage begins at Seattle's West Point after years of controversy on December 31, 1995 (http://www.historylink.org/essays/output.cfm?file_id=2735), HistoryLink.org Essay 2735, January 1, 2000. Accessed online April 14, 2007. 5. However, City Engineer (http://www.seattle.gov/cityarchives/Reference/Officials/Engineer.html), Seattle Municipal Archives, says that he "retired due to poor health". Accessed April 14, 2007. 6. Seattle City Council Members Arranged Chronologically by Term (http://www.seattle.gov/cityarchives/Reference/City_Council_Chron.html). Accessed April 14, 2007. 7. City Engineer (http://www.seattle.gov/eityarchives/Reference/Officials/Engineer.html), Seattle Municipal Archives. Accessed April 14, 2007

Copyright 2008 Jerry Olson October 11, 2008 8. Reginald Heber Thomson, That Man Thomson, University of Washington Press, 1950. OCLC 1688871. 9. City Engineer (http://w ww.seattle.gov/cityarchives/Reference/Officials/lingineer.html)and Mayors of the City of Seattle (http://www.seattle.gov/CityArchives/Reference/Mayors.htrrO Seattle Municipal Archives. Accessed April 14, 2007. 10. Sharon Boswell and Lorraine McConaghy, City reshaped: up and down (http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/centennial/march/reshaped.html), Seattle Times, March 17, 1996. Accessed online April 14, 2007. 11. Walt Crowley, Seattle Neighborhoods: Belltown-Denny Regrade -- Thumbnail History (http://www.historylink.org/essays/output.cfm?file_id=1123), HistoryLink.org Essay 1123, May 10, 1999. Accessed online April 14, 2007. 12. For another extensive description of this neighborhood and its transformations, see Clark Humphrey, Back to Belltown (http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=10383), The Stranger, April 4 - April 10, 2002 issue. Accessed online April 14, 2007. 13. Broadview-Thomson (http://www.seattleschools.org/area/historybook/broadview-thompson.pdf on the site of Seattle Public Schools. Accessed online April 14, 2007. Further reading

 An online excerpt (http://content.lib.washington.edu/w-w-spwsweb/essay.html) from Paul Dorpat and Genevieve McCoy, Building Washington: A history of Washington State Public Works, Seattle: Tartu Publications, 1998 talks about Seattle's water supply, and includes extensive discussion of Thomson's work on the Cedar River. External links

Video

 Eccentric Seattle: Reginald H. Thomson, King of the Hills (http://www.seattlechannel.org/schedule/programDetails.asp?t itle=69)

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reginald_H.Thomson"

Categories: 1856 births | 1949 deaths | American civil engineers | People from Seattle.| History of Seattle

 This page was last modified 15:18, 22 April 2007.  All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (See Copyrights for details.) Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a US- registered 501(c)(3) tax-deductible nonprofit charity.