Discovery Park

Seattle Parks says Discovery Park is the city’s largest park, 560 acres on most of the former Fort Lawton site. The park looks out from Magnolia Bluff over Puget Sound, with two miles of protected tidal beach, meadows, sea cliffs, forest, dunes, thickets, and streams.

Parks writes that the original name of West Point is PKa'dz Eltue, meaning “thrust far out.” Ancestors of the Duwamish, Suquamish, Tulalip, and Muckleshoot nations used the place for at least 4,000 and up to 10,000 years. A 1992 archaeological dig found woodworking tool kits kept on the beach. The 1855 Treaty of Point Elliott forced Indigenous people onto reservations.

Fort Lawton opened in the early 1900s on land Seattle civic groups had donated. During World War II, Parks says, as many as 20,000 troops were staged there at once and 1.1 million passed through. On March 8, 1970, Bernie Whitebear (Sin Aikst), Bob Satiacum (Puyallup), and more than 100 Native people occupied surplus land at the fort. Negotiations produced a public park and a 99-year lease for a cultural center. Senator Henry Jackson dedicated Discovery Park in 1973. Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center opened in 1977. The sources below are Seattle Parks pages.