Once upon a time, before Washington even became a state, the U.S. government let a railroad company build some train tracks along Lake Sammamish.
The Seattle, Lake Shore and Eastern Railway Company went ahead and built its railroad, following the north shore of Lake Union, heading north around Lake Washington and then turning south to traverse the east bank of Lake Sammamish. The venerable SLS&E, plagued by fraud and mismanagement, then promptly went out of business.
Some competitors took it over, the railroad chugged along, leading the way to settlements, resorts and lumber mills along the lake.
Fast forward to the turn of the last century, the east shore of Lake Sammamish is a leafy, wealthy suburb, the railroad shut down and King County acquired the old tracks to build a walking and biking trail.
But history can have a long tail, and the old railroad deal is still playing out in Washington courtrooms.
The final stretch of the trail opened last year, the missing piece in a 44-mile paved path running from Puget Sound, through Seattle, to the foothills of the Cascades, following the abandoned SLS&E tracks.
And yet, 137 years after the feds told SLS&E to build the railway — through nearly a century and a half of development, as houses were built, torn down and rebuilt again — the ownership of the Lake Sammamish shoreline remains in dispute.
The question: When Washington became a state in 1889, did it own the land along the shoreline, or had the federal government already granted it to the railroad? The answer to that question, filtered through decades of property transfers and sales, will help determine the ultimate fate of the land.
King County sued a group of homeowners in federal court in 2020, trying to force them to remove property the county says interferes with the trail.
The homeowners won a major victory Thursday, when the Washington Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the land was owned by Washington at statehood, which means that when it was later sold or given to private parties, those transfers were legit and it now belongs to the homeowners.
The county had previously won court battles over the width of the corridor, allowing it to build the trail in the first place.
Of course, in a dispute covering a century of easements, grants, deeds, plats, rights of way, patents and disclaims, nothing is simple. The case now returns to federal court, where a federal district judge had asked the state Supreme Court for some help interpreting the state constitution.
Regardless, the trail isn’t going anywhere.
The current dispute is about whether the property owners will have to remove things that cross the trail and come between it and the lake — walkways, plantings, docks and fences.
“We remain confident that the public’s right to use and enjoy the East Lake Sammamish Trail will be maintained,” Chase Gallagher, a spokesperson for King County Executive Dow Constantine, said in an email. “Both our federal and state courts have consistently rejected any claimed right of nearby property owners to interfere with the public trail.”
“The trail is going to continue to be operated and used; nothing is going to change trailwise,” said Randall Olsen, an attorney for the property owners. “It’s always been about their ability to access their docks on the water, which some of them have been there since 1970.”
The Supreme Court case drew the attention of the state Department of Natural Resources and The Pacific Coast Shellfish Growers Association, both worried that a finding for King County would have overturned longstanding property rights.
If the Supreme Court had found for King County, Justice Raquel Montoya-Lewis wrote, “Washington could lose many miles of shore lands and tidelands and face countless lawsuits by private owners who paid for land they never received.”
The disagreement concerns the meaning of Washington’s constitution, specifically the two sections of Article XVII. Section 1 says the state of Washington owns the shorelines of all navigable waters.
Section 2 lists one exception to Section 1. It says Washington “disclaims all title in and claim to all tide, swamp and overflowed lands, patented by the United States.”
Patent, in this sense, essentially means given by the United States to a person or business. Under the Homestead Act, for instance, the U.S. gave settlers 160 acres of land, so long as they lived on it for five years and improved it. Settlers got a patent for the land after that.
In the Lake Sammamish case, the easement the federal government granted to the railroad in 1887 is like a sliding doors moment.
If that represented a patent, as King County argued, it never belonged to Washington, because, per the Washington Constitution, the state disclaimed all shore lands patented by the federal government. That means that when King County bought the old rail line from the railroad in 1997, it also bought the shoreline.
But, if the shore lands were not patented to the railroad back in 1887, they belonged to Washington when it became a state and then filtered down through dozens if not hundreds of sales to the homeowners who claim the shoreline today. Through this door, when King County bought the rail line in 1997, the purchase didn’t include the attached shore lands.
Hoo boy.
“The right-of-way was an easement that did not constitute a land conveyance patented by the United States,” Montoya-Lewis wrote for the unanimous court. “Thus, the land belonged to Washington at the time of statehood and is presently owned by the homeowners.”
The court ruled this way for a few reasons.
King County’s interpretation, the court wrote, “would require a forced construction of the plain language” of the constitution and “run contrary to the framers’ intent.”
The court also looked to 19th century history. Before Washington became a state, a growing political movement, fearful that too much land had been given to railroads and they were growing too powerful, sought to reverse some railroad land grants.
From 1850 to 1870, Congress granted 174 million acres of land to the railroad companies, about 10% of the entire country. In exchange, the companies were supposed to build railroads on schedule, carry the mail and transport freight and soldiers.
The writers of Washington’s constitution, the court wrote, were distrustful of railroads because the companies were too often not holding up their end of the deal.
“By the time Washington became a state, there was growing skepticism of railroad companies,” Montoya-Lewis wrote. “So we infer that the framers meant what they said in art. XVII — that the state owned the tidelands except for those patented by the federal government, but not any more than that.”
And that is why, the court said, 137 years after the U.S. told a railroad company to build a track on Lake Sammamish, the people who now live on that shoreline can keep their docks in the lake.
