This Northern Pacific Railway (NPRR) bridge over the Green River stands163 feet high and is 1,119 feet long. It was built in 1914 and located about two miles upriver from Lester, a storied town of east King County, deep in the Tacoma watershed and west of Stampede Pass.
It’s called the High Steel Bridge. The history of Lester and Stampede Pass began with Northern Pacific’s charter to build the second transcontinental railroad. Their charter, granted by Abraham Lincoln, allowed NPRR to claim millions of acres of land along the route, but only after their tracks provided a direct link to the Puget Sound. Two circuitous routes did reach Tacoma, but the U.S. charged this violated the charter and gave notice for the railroad to complete the direct link or forfeit millions of land-grant acreage.
Northern Pacific swung into action starting from Buckley where tracks had earlier been laid to serve the coal mines of east Pierce County. From Enumclaw the tracks turned north into the upper Green River Valley past Palmer-Kanaskat into dense forests towards Stampede. From the east in Yakima the railroad was extended though Ellensburg to Stampede Pass, not far from Snoqualmie Summit.
Between these points lay two miles of solid rock where a passage was constructed in 1886 by a man named Nelson Bennett, who’d never before built a railroad tunnel. Over 2,000 Chinese workers helped build the rail line while the tunnel claimed 34 lives before it was completed. Today, that old tunnel is a popular bicycle path. With the railroad in place a number of towns sprung up along the way, the most important of which would turn out to be Lester.
Over the next several weeks, this column will tell the history of Lester and the railroad, which provided its reason for being.
This Feb. 13, 1915 photo by Asahel Curtis (image #1943.42.31907) comes courtesy of Washington State Historical Society in Tacoma.
