Eugene Loring McAllaster was born April 20, 1866 in

Pennsylvania Pennsylvania (; ( Pennsylvania Dutch: )), officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is a state spanning the Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern, Appalachian, and Great Lakes regions of the United States. It borders Delaware to its southeast, ...

. A distinguished

Seattle Seattle ( ) is a seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the seat of King County, Washington. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in both the state of Washington and the Pacific Northwest regio ...

Washington Washington commonly refers to: * Washington (state), United States * Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States ** A metonym for the federal government of the United States ** Washington metropolitan area, the metropolitan area centered o ...

naval architect This is the top category for all articles related to architecture and its practitioners. {{Commons category, Architecture occupations Design occupations Occupations Occupation commonly refers to: *Occupation (human activity), or job, one's role ...

and

engineer Engineers, as practitioners of engineering, are professionals who invent, design, analyze, build and test machines, complex systems, structures, gadgets and materials to fulfill functional objectives and requirements while considering the limit ...

, he is most famous for designing the historic Seattle fireboat

Duwamish Duwamish may refer to: * Duwamish tribe, a Native American tribe in Washington state * Duwamish River, in Washington state * ''Duwamish'' (fireboat) See also * Elliott Bay Elliott Bay is a part of the Central Basin region of Puget Sound. It is ...

. He was also a consulting engineer on Seattle's Denny Hill and Jackson Street regrades. Mr. McAllaster graduated from the

University of Michigan , mottoeng = "Arts, Knowledge, Truth" , former_names = Catholepistemiad, or University of Michigania (1817–1821) , budget = $10.3 billion (2021) , endowment = $17 billion (2021)As o ...

in 1889 and in 1890 he married Katherine F. Nichols. ''Kittie'', as she was known by friends and family, was born in

Michigan Michigan () is a U.S. state, state in the Great Lakes region, Great Lakes region of the Upper Midwest, upper Midwestern United States. With a population of nearly 10.12 million and an area of nearly , Michigan is the List of U.S. states and ...

, on June 16, 1867, and spent her girlhood in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The newlyweds lived in

Detroit Detroit ( , ; , ) is the largest city in the U.S. state of Michigan. It is also the largest U.S. city on the United States–Canada border, and the seat of government of Wayne County. The City of Detroit had a population of 639,111 at t ...

until their move to Seattle in 1894. Mr. McAllaster quickly established himself in the Seattle business community as a skilled naval architect and engineer. He became deeply involved with the Denny Hill Regrade and Jackson Street Regrade, and was an integral part of the successes of these massive undertakings. With his business prospering he purchased a fine Capitol Hill home on March 2, 1902, at 509 Belmont, overlooking downtown Seattle,

Puget Sound Puget Sound ( ) is a sound of the Pacific Northwest, an inlet of the Pacific Ocean, and part of the Salish Sea. It is located along the northwestern coast of the U.S. state of Washington. It is a complex estuarine system of interconnected ma ...

and the

Olympic Mountains The Olympic Mountains are a mountain range on the Olympic Peninsula of the Pacific Northwest of the United States. The mountains, part of the Pacific Coast Ranges, are not especially high – Mount Olympus is the highest at ; however, the easte ...

. Seattle in the early 1900s, with its long waterfront of wooden docks, warehouses and merchant vessels, was an enormous responsibility for Seattle's fire department. It was rightfully feared that another devastating fire like the

Great Seattle Fire The Great Seattle Fire was a fire that destroyed the entire central business district of Seattle, Washington on June 6, 1889. The conflagration lasted for less than a day, burning through the afternoon and into the night, and during the same sum ...

of 1889 would overwhelm the capability of the city's single

fireboat A fireboat or fire-float is a specialized watercraft with pumps and nozzles designed for fighting shoreline and shipboard fires. The first fireboats, dating to the late 18th century, were tugboats, retrofitted with firefighting equipme ...

, the ''Snoqualmie''. In response to this concern, a new and more powerful fireboat was ordered in 1909. The city entrusted the important fireboat design responsibility to Mr. McAllaster. It wasn't in Mr. McAllaster's character to design just some old tub with water cannons. He had arrived in Seattle only five years after the Great Seattle Fire and he knew what kind of catastrophe another big city fire would cause. He set out to design a state of the art fireboat like no other. What he designed was the most powerful fireboat in the world at the time, the fireboat ''Duwamish''. Mr. McAllaster died on January 30, 1961, and is buried next to his wife in Seattle's

Lake View Cemetery Lake View Cemetery is a privately owned, nonprofit garden cemetery located in the cities of Cleveland, Cleveland Heights, and East Cleveland in the U.S. state of Ohio. Founded in 1869, the cemetery was favored by wealthy families during the Gil ...

, along with other Seattle notables.

References

''The Charles A. Rough Archive'', 2006

External links

Biography of Eugene L. McAllasterSeattle's Historic Fireboat ''Duwamish''
{{DEFAULTSORT:McAllaster, Eugene 1866 births 1946 deaths American naval architects Engineers from Washington (state) People from Seattle University of Michigan alumni