Gas Works Park now stands.

By the late 1800s, the winter village was mostly abandoned and the lake had become a center of commercial activity. Railway tracks were built around the lake to serve nearby sawmills and villages, and steamboats carried farmers, loggers and schoolchildren across the lake.

Stern of the Jeanette, a wooden fishing vessel divers found in Lake Union. Photo by Chris Borgen

Houseboats became popular summer homes on Lake Union in the early 1900s, occupied by a new middle class created by the Alaska Gold Rush. After the ship canal opened in 1917, the lake quickly became a hub for mills and boatbuilding. A spate of boat shops opened on Lake Union between 1919 and 1929, building pleasure yachts as well as tugs, trawlers and halibut schooners.

And eachsuccessive wave of development left its mark on the lake bottom.

Over the ensuing decades, boatbuilding waned and new types of developments sprung up around the lake. In the 1960s, Dick and Colleen Wagner, who later founded the Center for Wooden Boats, were living in a houseboat on the lake. Dick Wagner recalls a neighbor once telling him that he sank someone’s tugboat on the lake out of spite. Wagner began wondering how many sunken boats were concealed beneath the lake’s surface.

Several decades later, those musings led to the archeology project now under way. The center received a federal grant to research the lake’s history. That led to Wagner writing a book, “Legends of the Lake,” a series of essays chronicling the lake’s geological and cultural history that further