The Story of Washington’s Missing Town

In May of 1915, citizens of the sleepy little town of Moncton, WA realized they had a problem on their hands. The lake at the edge of town was beginning to rise. First it started rising slowly, but eventually Rattlesnake Lake would swallow their homes.

At the turn of the 20th century, Seattle was a quickly growing city in the wilderness of the Northwest. Between 1900 and 1910, the population of the city more than doubled. This many people meant that Seattle had an infrastructure problem on their hands. The city needed power, and it needed it quick. So, in 1910, the city authorized the building of a masonry dam over the Cedar River to generate electricity.

This is where Moncton comes in. The town of roughly 200 people was founded in 1906 and housed workers in the logging and rail industries. By 1915, the town had its own barber shop, restaurant, saloon, and indoor swimming pool. Unfortunately for the residents of Moncton, they lived down stream of the new dam being built by the city of Seattle.

In a rush to build the dam, the city seems to have skipped a few basic engineering studies that would have warned them of future problems with the dam. Chief among these were that they were building a dam on top of a glacial moraine. That is to say, they were building a dam on gravel and sand.

According to a newspaper article at the time:

No complete and thorough examination of the dam site had ever been made, nor had any even partially-complete engineering plans of any description been prepared, nor had any borings been made or test pits sunk along the north bank, which is a gravel plateau or moraine, very pervious to water

Alas, the city pushed on with the dam and in 1914 construction was started. By the spring of 1915, the pool behind the dam that would later become Chester Morse Lake, began to fill. Almost immediately, there were problems. Nearby residents started noticing springs erupting out of the ground. As the lake rose, springs turned into geysers. Leakage was so bad that the lake behind the dam started to lose water faster than it could fill up. The water was dropping as much as an inch an hour or 4.2 million cubic feet a day.

This is when the city noticed they had a problem on their hands. According to an article written a few years after the incident “while the dam was on a rock foundation,  that foundation was plainly but a spur of rock. From a point two miles east of the dam, on the north side, bedrock has not been touched, and in the explorations to locate its depth glacial deposits of more than 300 feet have been penetrated.” The hills literally leaked like a strainer for miles in either direction.

Unfortunately for the residents of Moncton, there wasn’t anywhere for the water to go but into nearby Rattlesnake Lake. So, the water in Rattlesnake Lake began to rise. The city came up with quite a few possible solutions to stopping the water. They thought of silting the bottom of the reservoir with clay, to prevent the water from getting to the moraine below. There wasn’t a nearby source of clay, so this plan was ultimately abandoned. Another plan was to inject liquid cement into the moraine, but costs ultimately stopped the plan before it began.

So, the town of Moncton was ultimately left to its ultimate fate as a lake bed. In May 1915, the water in Rattlesnake Lake was rising as much as a foot per day. Personal items were removed from houses via rowboat or barge. Eventually, some of the houses broke free of their foundations and floated in the lake like corks. Eventually, the city of Seattle paid the former residents of Moncton a little under $48,000 for their land.

Worried about contaminating the water in Chester Morse Lake, the city came back the following year to finish what the flood hadn’t. A few salvageable homes were moved to higher ground, but everything else was burned to the ground. All that remained were a few foundations.

Moncton today:

Today, the the town exists primarily under Rattlesnake Ledge. During dry summers, you can occasionally see the foundations of some of the original buildings, but not much else remains. If you hike to Rattlesnake Ledge, you can walk around the base of the lake and get an amazing view of where the town used to stand from the top of the ledge.

If you hike Cedar Butte, you start the hike near the old Cedar River station that serviced Moncton, and walk along the old rail line that the trains used to run. Unfortunately, the view towards Moncton has been mostly overgrown. So, if you want to see where the town used to stand, hike Cedar Butte in the winter when the leaves are off the trees.