Early road travel in Washington, ca. 1900. Credit: Washington State Archives, used with permission

It’s still Archives Month here in Washington State, and I’m still digging this celebratory photo archive, which offers a bit of perspective on our current transportation challenges:

Early road travel in Washington, ca. 1900.
  • Washington State Archives, used with permission
  • Early road travel in Washington, ca. 1900.
Flooded Clark County Road No. 15, ca. 1949.
  • Washington State Archives, used with permission
  • Flooded Clark County Road No. 15, ca. 1949.
Negotiating snow and gravel ruts on the James Nelson Road near Renton, ca. 1910.
  • Washington State Archives, used with permission
  • Negotiating snow and gravel ruts on the James Nelson Road near Renton, ca. 1910.

Confidential to former Mayor Nickels: If you’d been running this town 100 years earlier, you probably could have survived plow-gate.

Eli Sanders was The Stranger's associate editor. His book, "While the City Slept," was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He once did this and once won...

4 replies on “Got a Road Complaint? Talk to These Guys”

  2. There’s some interesting pictures in the archives, but anyone used to shorpy (http://www.shorpy.com/) will be frustrated at the interface. It takes multiple clicks to get to the high-resolution version of each image, and you often find yourself back at the beginning of the index when you return from looking at a single photograph. It won’t let you open individual photo’s in a new tab. The archives also seem to include only one picture from each series. It’s not really a digital archive; it’s more of a digital catalog with some scans added to make it easier to figure out which parts of the collection you want to examine in person.

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