Following up on my other post about Tumwater, one I’ve been meaning to do for awhile now.

When people talk about the old Tumwater that was killed by I5, they mean the one that was centered along the Deschutes waterway (the same termonlolgy we use to talk about the Duwamish Waterway) and this road:


View Larger Map

This side street down the bluff in the South Capitol Neighborhood is all that remains for the old main road that went directly from Tumwater (New Market) to Olympia (Smithfield).

Tumwater and Olympia Brewery from UW Library:

Here is how the road looks when you overlay (from this map from the Washington Digital Archives) it with modern Tumwater.

And, just because I used Google Earth, here it is at a lower angle.

The main difference to me is obviously Interstate 5’s impact, cutting directly through the landscape. Other than that, its striking how much fill has been added. The center of the old waterway is now fill, for instance.