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87 stories matching rot
- Tacoma’s Crumbling Infrastructure
Public Works Commissioner William Welsh warns that over a dozen city bridges are rotting and unsafe for public travel.
- The Price of Plutocracy
As violence erupts at the Homestead Steel Works, an Aberdeen editorial probes the rot of industrial concentration and the rise of a new American caste system.
- Anti-Chinese Mob Drives Hop Pickers from Tampico
Armed vigilantes enforce local exclusionist sentiment, leaving hop crops to rot in the Yakima Valley.
- The Church as a Public Refuge
Rev. Wallace Nutting argues that churches should be open 24/7, serving the city as community centers with drinking fountains and social services rather than just Sunday pulpits.
- The Peril of the Palouse Trail
A Spokane County postmaster is left partially paralyzed after a grisly highway accident caused by a horse carcass left rotting on the mountain road.
- The Highs and Lows of the Tolt Hop Fields
A local farmer details the boom and bust cycles of hop production in the Snoqualmie Valley.
- The Apple Industry’s Existential Crisis
A committee of Pacific Northwest growers warns that thousands of carloads of fruit are rotting in orchards, necessitating a centralized by-product industry to survive.
- The Haunted Bones of the Wishkah
A local discovery of 'giant' skeletons stirs rumors of an ancient, accursed race in the Aberdeen river valley.
- The Local Press and the Mob
A critique of Washington newspapers that refused to take a hard moral stand against lynch law.
- A Father Arrested at His Daughter's Bedside
While seven-year-old Lillian Hawkenson recovered from a leg amputation, her father's erratic behavior led to his arrest and removal from her bedside.
- The Salvation Army's Plan to End Urban Poverty
A proposal to move impoverished tenement dwellers from congested cities onto government-allotted public lands in the West.
- Corruption Scandal Sweeps Whatcom
Former city officials are arrested for embezzlement while the community demands a grand jury to investigate municipal rot.
- The Rotting Schoolhouse
A local mechanic alerts the city to a school building construction so shoddy it was doomed to collapse.
- The Great Butterine Debate
A Seattle agricultural journal takes a hard stance against the 'fraud' of oleomargarine, arguing that the industry's decline is a moral victory for farmers.
- The Ghost Ship of Seattle Wharf
Once a celebrated Pacific passenger steamer, the California met a final, unglamorous fate as a stripped-down bark moored on the Seattle waterfront.
- The Ghost Town of a Pioneer's Dream
A German immigrant spends decades waiting for his Puget Sound homestead to become a metropolis, only to see the boom vanish as quickly as it arrived.
- Tragedy at the Tacoma Coal Bunkers
A collapse of a loading chute drops seven men into forty feet of water, leading to a desperate rescue attempt and a tragic loss.
- The Great Stink of 1882
When Makah schoolgirls in Neah Bay proved to their matron that rotting whale blubber smelled better than imported Limburger cheese.
- The Apple Market Revolution
A local lecturer urges Kennewick fruit growers to bypass traditional middlemen and adopt large-scale auction houses to fix stagnant apple prices.
- A Violent Dispute Over the White River Tobacco Harvest
A partnership turns sour when a farmer allegedly assaults his partner with a piece of lumber during the curing process.
- The Secret Corral in the Rocks
A Whitman County stock association uncovers a hidden canyon hideout used by a gang of rustlers to hoard stolen hogs.
- The Invisible Army Under the Microscope
A scientific lecture delivered in Snohomish contemplates the origins of life, the invisible world of bacteria, and the processes of decay.
- The Newsboys' War Against the Ledger
Tacoma’s newspaper war turns street-level as organized newsboys mobilize to block the sale of a scab publication.
- King County Berry Growers Take Back the Market
After strawberries rotted on the docks and sold for pennies, farmers form a union to ship surplus fruit east and set their own terms.
- The Hidden Scourge on the Rooftop
When a cigar factory worker in Seattle was discovered to be rotting from a mysterious disease, it sparked a local panic over health, labor, and the limits of the city's care.