In the Meadowbrook neighborhood of northeast Seattle, the North and South Forks of the Thornton Creek system come to a convergence point on 35th Ave NE at NE 107th Street. Since the 1990s intensive work has gone into this site, including the creation of Meadowbrook Pond to collect and filter the water before its final outflow into Lake Washington at Matthews Beach.
The Thornton Creek system with its many tributaries has always been integral to life in Meadowbrook. Meadowbrook’s earliest settlers took land claims where they would have access to creek water for irrigating crops, and where they would be able to dig wells to obtain fresh drinking water.
In the days of farming in Meadowbrook, different segments and tributaries of the creek were known by the name of the closest resident. By the 1890s the first land claimants, the Beckers, had sold some of their land but they still lived near what is now Lake City Way at NE 107th Street. The creek flowed past Beckers’ into the valley of the Fischer farm at the present site of the fields of Nathan Hale High School.
The Nishitani family with their plant nursery at 98th & Ravenna named their tributary Willow Creek for the tree on its banks. Farther to the east of 35th Ave NE, the converged main stream was known as Matthews since John Matthews owned land from NE 95th Street over to his home on the shore of Lake Washington.
Thornton Creek
In the 1990s activists such as Brian Bodenbach, one of the founders of the community group Thornton Creek Alliance, began to bring attention to the health of the creek as a wake-up call about pollution, flooding, and the need to promote clean water for the health of people, plants and animals.
Also in the 1990s government departments such as Seattle Engineering and Seattle Public Utilities worked to create Meadowbrook Pond, first created in 1998, and began to take an overall-view of the entire creek system along its eighteen-mile length.
At that time in the 1990s, the name Thornton Creek began to be better known, but why was this name chosen for the watershed system? Who was Thornton? To date, we have not found any evidence of who Thornton Creek was named for.
This blog article will tell about the life of John Thornton, an early settler in Washington Territory. Even though he never lived in the Seattle area, I speculate that the watershed system might have been an honorary name, because John Thornton served in the early legislature of Washington Territory.
Wedgwood in Seattle History 