page_title: George F. Cotterill
section_title: Thomson and Cotterill
hierarchical_section_title: George F. Cotterill / Thomson and Cotterill
caption_attribution_description: Description in the published source (1919): "The dam across Cedar River Canyon in course of construction." This was part of the process of creating Seattle's Cedar River water supply.
context_page_description: George Fletcher Cotterill, born in Oxford, England, was an American civil servant and politician. His public career in Seattle and the state of Washington lasted over 40 years; Cotterill was a Georgist progressive. He was an advocate of woman suffrage, prohibition, land value tax, municipalisation of port facilities and utilities, and the development of public parks.
context_section_description: Thomson became City Engineer in 1892 and appointed Cotterill as an assistant. They developed the basis of what remains Seattle's main water supply over a century later (see Seattle Public Utilities), bringing in water from the Cedar River. The financial hurdles were almost as daunting as the technical difficulties.  In an 8 July 1889 election, barely a month after the Great Seattle Fire (6 June 1889) Seattle's citizens had voted 1,875 to 51 to acquire and operate their own water system. However, the Panic of 1893 wrecked the city's finances. Cotterill devised the then-novel plan of borrowing money for the pipeline by pledging the receipts from the water to be delivered when the $1,250,000 system was completed. This brought Cotterill into electoral politics for the first time, supporting his own plan in an 1895 special election. The Klondike Gold Rush put Seattle on a sound economic footing and the 1901 completion of Cedar River Supply System No. 1 (active from 21 February 1901) gave the city a steady supply of clean water.
  Other achievements by Thomson and Cotterill in this era included 25 miles of bicycle trails (later the basis of the city's Olmsted boulevard system) the filling of tideflats that compose much of today's SoDo and Industrial District south of Downtown Seattle, and the development of the plats that still determine the general plan of the piers on Seattle's Central Waterfront. Each pier is more or less a parallelogram. Most earlier piers, none of which survive, formed a perfect right angle to the shore, and the curvature of the shore meant that each pier was at a slightly different angle, causing potential for collisions. Their uniform northeast-southwest direction was prescribed by Thomson and Cotterill not only solved that problem but also spared freight trains from needing to make a sharp right angle.
caption: Cedar River Dam under construction, circa 1900.
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