Welcome to Lake Union or “Little Water = ha-ah-chu”

Explore the history of the lake through the words of the Duwamish tribe or ha-ah-chu AHBSH which means “People of the Littlest Lake.”

Natural History and Geology

Picture five Space Needles stacked on top of each other. This was the size of the Vashon Glacier, a 3,000-foot tall ice sheet that gouged out Lake Union and Lake Washington and sculpted Puget Sound during its retreat over 13,000 years ago.

Imagine...

Steep forested hillsides slope to a wild, driftwood-littered beach. Cougar tracks lead to the lake, you follow them to a mound of sticks and reeds - a beaver lodge. Listen. A fish jumps. A loon chuckles.

A video about the Virgina V.

An oral history from David Coy

You know [as a boy] we’d come around in a skiff, and we’d climb up the anchor chains on these sailing ships and get right up on the bowsprit and jump. That was probably back around ‘32, ‘34, something like that. We had a houseboat and my dad would pull it with a boat, and we’d come into the moorage and hook up the water and put the clamp on, twist the wires together, and boom we’re in business. And we’d stay wherever, and we’d move again.