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| Year | Stories |
|---|---|
| 1876 | 9 |
| 1877 | 4 |
| 1878 | 2 |
| 1880 | 3 |
18 stories matching beyond
- The Seattle Soap Factory's Industrial Ambition
A local manufacturer touts a 'better than oil' solution for the region's logging industry in 1877.
- The City That Couldn't Keep Up: Seattle’s Housing Crisis of 1876
As immigrants flood in from Kansas and beyond, the city's building boom fails to match the demand for shelter, threatening a severe shortage before winter sets in.
- The Great Smokestack Hoax: Seattle’s Mountain Top Mystery
In 1873, local entrepreneur S. W. Peck convinced the city that a legendary 'living rod' lay buried atop American Flat. His desperate drilling operation reveals more about the era's speculative fever than geological truth.
- Seattle and Walla Walla Railroad Takes Land-Grant Case to Congress
A legislative battle brews in Congress over land-grant endowments that could finally connect Seattle to the interior.
- The Hilltop Inferno: Arson Claims a Seattle Landmark
When the residence of J.P. Robbins burned in 1877, the city’s lack of water infrastructure and public apathy turned a potential save into a total loss.
- The High Cost of Keeping Warm in Pioneer Seattle
As Seattle's population climbed toward 45,000 in 1880, local leaders sounded the alarm on the soaring price of firewood and looked to the untapped coal mines of the region for a heating revolution.
- The Mayor’s Peaches and the City’s Panic: A Night of Burglary in Pioneer Square
Burglars break into Mayor Gattert’s home on Third Street, fleeing with nothing but a can of peaches, while public outrage over crime reaches a fever pitch.
- The Great Coal Tariff Debate
An 1876 editorial argues for high protectionist tariffs on coal to shield Puget Sound mining wages from foreign competition and low-wage labor.
- The Tramp Economy of Early Seattle
A reporter encounters a 'bummer' among the weeds of Mission Bay, revealing the harsh, transient reality of laborers who roamed the Pacific Coast in the 1870s.
- The Broken Promise of the Puyallup Coal Road
A political scandal erupts as Seattle accuses an attorney of pocketing fees while failing to stop the Northern Pacific Railway from seizing massive swathes of King County land.
- The Price of Loyalty in 1880 Seattle
As Seattle went to the polls in 1880, local editors warned that political fealty to the Republican party was the only way to secure the University and future federal favors.
- The Boom That Busted
Reflecting on the 'mushroom' growth and subsequent economic fallout of 1870s Seattle, a local editor recounts a tale of over-speculation, debt, and the volatile reliance on steamship-driven growth.
- The Ghost of Third and Pike
A Seattle resident recounts a chilling, post-mortem promise kept by a friend who returned from the beyond to answer questions about a late-arriving train.
- The Rambling Village That Wanted to Be a City
An 1876 editorial reflects on Seattle’s humble, sprawling aesthetic, arguing that the lack of architectural grandeur was not a failure of taste, but a deliberate, democratic strategy to avoid the 'unhealthy' wealth concentration of Eastern cities.
- The Fire That Built a City: Seattle's Timber Boom Rises from the Ashes
Three years after the Great Fire of 1889 devastated the waterfront, Seattle’s lumber mills are running at full capacity, shipping millions of feet of wood to Hawaii and beyond to rebuild not just this city, but the Pacific.
- The Checkerboard Trap: How the Northern Pacific Railroad Hoarded Washington’s Land
An editorial in The Daily Intelligencer exposes how the railroad company used federal land grants to block settlers from claiming homesteads, leaving thousands of acres in legal limbo and stalling the growth of Seattle and Tacoma.
- The Iron Vein: Seattle’s Gamble on the Railroad
In 1876, local leaders rallied behind a desperate bid to connect the young city of Seattle to the interior coal mines and grain lands, arguing that the railroad was the only path from frontier outpost to global port.
- The Engineer’s Ash-Box Ghost: A Tale of New Year’s Eve Peril
In a column dated October 1870, the Seattle Daily Intelligencer reprints a harrowing tale from an old engineer about surviving a wreck by hiding under his locomotive's ash pan during a blizzard.