Lake Washington steamboats and ferries sternwheeler "Lena C. Gray" was built in Seattle, and operated on Lake Washington most of the time, towing barges. In about 1886, Edward F. Lee established a shipyard on the west side Lake Washington. The Lee yard is believed to have built the following ships that worked Lake Washington and Puget Sound: the small steam scow "Squak", "Laura Maud", "Elfin", "Hattie Hansen" (also known as "Sechelt"), and "Mist". Other early steamboats on the lake were "Kirkland" and "Mary Kraft". G.V. Johnson also built a shipyard on the lake in 1888, and from it launched, among others, the steamers "L.T. Haas",
Puget Sound melting retreat of the Vashon Glaciation eroded the land, creating a drumlin field of hundreds of aligned drumlin hills. Lake Washington and Lake Sammamish (which are ribbon lakes), Hood Canal, and the main Puget Sound basin were altered by glacial forces. These glacial forces are not specifically "carving", as in cutting into the landscape via the mechanics of ice/glaciers, but rather eroding the landscape from melt water of the Vashon Glacier creating the drumlin field. As the ice retreated, vast amounts of glacial till were deposited throughout the Puget Sound region. The soils of the region, less than ten thousand