In 1897, the city of Seattle donated land on Magnolia Bluff to the US government to build a new Army post as part of a defense system for Puget Sound; this was designated as Fort Lawton in 1900. During most of its active service, the fort served as an embarkation station where troops gathered before being sent to duty in Asia and the Pacific. The fort also served as Prisoner of War camp during WWII.
In the late 1960s, the US Army announced its intention to decommission most of the land at Fort Lawton. This prompted the City of Seattle to plan for a park on the land, while Native American activists wanted to reclaim the land for Indigenous use. Ultimately the city received most of the land for what would become Discovery Park, and after a peaceful occupation led by Bernie Whitebear (Sin-Aikst or Sinixt), the United Indian People’s Council (later United Indians of All Tribes) received 17 acres to build a cultural center; the Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center opened in 1977.
More of the Fort Lawton land was transferred to the City of Seattle in 1975, and Fort Lawton officially closed in 2011, with the final transfer of property the following year.
As many as 20,000 troops at a time were staged at Fort Lawton during World War II, and a total of 1.1 million troops passed through the Fort during and after the war. About 1,150 German prisoners of war were housed there, and some are buried in the cemetery there. This image shows a group of German POWs at Fort Lawton.
Sign in image: First Section Theatre. Handwritten on sleeve: FORT LAWTON, Wash., German prisoners, viewing atrocity scenes. Date photograph was filed at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (date of photograph and file date may differ by a month or more): June 6, 1945.
