George Fletcher Cotterill (November 18, 1865 – October 13, 1958), born in Oxford, England, was an American civil servant and politician.

He was an advocate of woman suffrage, prohibition, land value tax, municipalisation of port facilities and utilities, and the development of public parks.

After graduating from high school in Montclair—at the young age of 15 and as class valedictorian—he worked as a rod man on a railroad survey, while training to be a surveyor and engineer.

They had hoped to find work for the Northern Pacific Railroad, but by the time they arrived the project in question had been suspended.

Cotterill laid out the seating diagram for Frye Opera House (Seattle's premier theatre of its time), worked for the Columbia & Puget Sound Railway, the Seattle, Lake Shore & Eastern Railway, and eventually for the Northern Pacific when they resumed development in the region.

[7] Cotterill devised the then-novel plan of borrowing money for the pipeline by pledging the receipts from the water to be delivered when the $1,250,000 system was completed.

[1] The Klondike Gold Rush put Seattle on a sound economic footing[7] and the 1901 completion of Cedar River Supply System No.

[10] Other achievements by Thomson and Cotterill in this era included 25 miles of bicycle trails (later the basis of the city's Olmsted boulevard system) the filling of tideflats that compose much of today's SoDo and Industrial District south of Downtown Seattle, and the development of the plats that still determine the general plan of the piers on Seattle's Central Waterfront.

Their uniform northeast-southwest direction was prescribed by Thomson and Cotterill not only solved that problem but also spared freight trains from needing to make a sharp right angle.

[11][12] An increasingly prominent figure in the city, Cotterill was soon embroiled in matters unrelated to his technical skills (or even his financial skills) Gold Rush money had turned Seattle into a wide open city: brothels and casinos flourished, as did concomitant corruption.

Crossing the aisle, he became the leader of progressive Republicans, and successfully built support for the direct primary law of 1907.

He backed local option as a step toward the prohibition of alcohol and drafted an amendment to the state constitution that granted women the right to vote in 1910, a decade ahead of the country at large.

[5] Hiram Gill ran successfully for the Seattle mayoralty in 1910 on "open city" platform, defeating real estate man George W. Dilling.

[16] Although in some ways his moment of triumph, Cotterill was by this time, in Roger Sales's words, riding "two horses… moving in different directions".

His desire for municipal ownership of utilities and public control of ports allied him with labour and populism; his lifelong Prohibitionist views did not.

There were thousands of vice-related warrantless arrests, and the crackdown on vice may simply have created new and different modes of police corruption.

In summer 1913, during the Golden Potlach celebration, Blethen succeeded in stirring up already hot tempers and sparking a riot that destroyed the local offices of the Industrial Workers of the World and of the Socialist Party.