Des Moines Memorial Drive
road in King County, Washington, US
Des Moines Memorial Drive, also known locally as the Living Road of Remembrance, is a road in southern King County, Washington, noted for its large numbers of American elm trees planted as a memorial to soldiers killed in World War I.
Route description
Des Moines Memorial Drive traces a path through the middle of the region of King County informally known as Highline, beginning in downtown Des Moines at Marine View Drive. It continues approximately north through SeaTac and Burien to South 188th Street, then turns west and becomes part of SR 509. At Ambaum Boulevard and Normandy Road it turns north again and heads approximately northeast through Boulevard Park and becomes 14th Avenue South at SR 99 and the city boundary of Seattle.
History
Originally called the High Line Road, or sometimes the Des Moines Road, the road was a major thoroughfare between Seattle and Tacoma and was thought at the time to be more important than the more well-known Pacific Highway a few miles to the east.
War memorial
On November 11, 1921, members of the Seattle Garden Club, led by Lillian Gustin McEwan, planted 25 trees along the road, intending to establish it as a war memorial. Eventually 1,432 elms were planted, representing the number of soldiers from Washington State killed in the war.
Decline and Restoration
Over the years most of the trees were stricken by Dutch elm disease and eventually succumbed to radical pruning and aging. King County is undertaking a project to restore and enhance the memorial.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Des Moines Memorial Drive” is road in King County, Washington, US. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Moines, Memorial and Drive, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “road in King County, Washington, US” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5263521. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1921.
Architectural summaries often privilege surviving fabric and can understate demolished phases, contested use or displaced communities. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Des Moines Memorial Drive” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.