Starting in 1895, the City of Seattle began to purchase land in the upper Cedar River watershed to supply water and electric power for the growing city. In 1914, workers completed a large masonry dam just below Cedar Lake (now Chester Morse Lake), and the lake became a reservoir. As the city added more land to its holdings, the people who had lived there had to move away. Employees of Seattle City Light and City Water lived in nearby Cedar Falls, not far from a waterfall of the same name.

This photographic postcard, probably taken in the 1910s, shows a house and outbuildings near a lake identified as Cedar Falls Lake.