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| Year | Stories |
|---|---|
| 1876 | 25 |
| 1877 | 11 |
| 1878 | 3 |
| 1880 | 5 |
44 stories matching plan
- Seattle's Grand New Courthouse Plans Unveiled
Architect Isaac Palmer presents a bold, brick-and-mortar vision for the corner of Third and Jefferson, signaling the city's aspirations for civic permanence.
- The Fairview Dream: Installment Housing in 1878 Seattle
A real estate advertisement for the 'Fairview Addition' highlights the city's early embrace of the installment plan to help working-class families buy land.
- The Fairview Addition: A 19th-Century Real Estate Pitch
An 1878 advertisement for a 'rich, level' tract of land reveals how early Seattle developers used the installment plan to sell the dream of homeownership.
- The Front Street Bottleneck
A classic tale of early Seattle infrastructure, where a proposed bridge at Seneca Street was deemed 'a fifth wheel to a wagon' by a fed-up local editor.
- The Schoolhouse That Wasn't: Seattle’s Bureaucratic Battle Over Public Education
In 1877, a local dispute over the construction of a new school in Helltown reveals the early struggles of civic infrastructure and the tension between taxpayer demands and administrative delay.
- The Land Grab That Stalled Seattle’s Growth
A local editorial warns that the Northern Pacific Railroad’s hoarding of millions of acres is strangling settlement and development in Washington Territory.
- The Ethics of the Sting
A century before modern debates on police entrapment, Washington courts were already grappling with the line between preventing crime and creating it.
- Vandals Wreck Indian Canoe
Youths on the Seattle waterfront destroy an Indigenous person's boat for sport.
- The Peril of Floating Streets
As Seattle's waterfront development grew in 1876, the street commissioner sounded an alarm over the city's vulnerable, buoyant wooden pavements.
- The Divorce Consultation That Did Not Go As Planned
A determined woman visits a Seattle attorney seeking help to evict her husband, only to be told that the law does not work quite the way she imagined.
- The Artist and the Terrier: A Seattle Romance
A down-and-out clerk uses his only asset—a well-trained terrier—to win the favor of a grumpy painter and the hand of his beloved in 1870s Seattle.
- The Price of Justice in 1876 Seattle
A meticulous audit of King County court records reveals the day-to-day costs of frontier law, from witness fees for 'Indian Lucy' to the building of the very first jail.
- The Pioneer Dream: Settling Seattle as an Organized Colony
In 1877, Seattle newspapers championed the idea of 'colonizing' the Washington Territory to solve the isolation of homesteading, mirroring today's debates over density and regional growth.
- The Push for a Western Migration
In 1877, Seattle boosters and railroad agents mapped out a deliberate campaign to transform the Puget Sound basin from a 'remote' wilderness into a thriving, industrial metropolis.
- Inside the New King County Jail
A detailed look at the 'infallible' brick and iron lockup built to replace older, makeshift holding cells in 1870s Seattle.
- The Brick Renaissance: Transforming Seattle’s 'Tinderbox' Downtown
As Seattle began to outgrow its temporary wooden origins, local businessmen pushed to replace fire-prone wooden structures with modern brick blocks, signaling a new era of permanence and civic ambition.
- The Steilacoom Bubble That Burst
A grand, failed railway scheme proves that even the most ambitious 'railroad kings' can't build an empire without a single cent in the bank.
- The Seattle Coal Cooperative of 1876
A century and a half ago, Seattle workers formed a mutual benefit mining company to secure their own fuel and profits.
- Building a Future: The 1876 Fight for Seattle’s School Sites
As Seattle’s population swelled in the 1870s, city leaders scrambled to secure prime real estate for education amidst a booming, land-hungry frontier town.
- The Dream of a Shortcut to the World
A century and a half ago, Seattle boosters saw a Central American canal as the key to unlocking Washington’s timber wealth and connecting it to the globe.
- The Great Railway Pipe Dream
A century and a half ago, speculators and dreamers were already busy mapping out the future of Seattle's rail lines and debating the superiority of Puget Sound over Canadian ports.
- Seattle Investors Plan a Boot Factory and Tannery
Before tech and aerospace, Seattle’s business elite plotted to stop shipping raw hides to San Francisco and instead build a city of tanneries and shoe factories.
- The Engineering Fever of 1876
As bridge-building projects skyrocket across the nation, Seattle looks toward the ambitious, iron-willed future of American infrastructure.
- The Art of Boosting: How Early Seattle Built a Territory
In an era before mass media, Seattle’s newspaper editors viewed themselves as the primary architects of immigration, using booster journalism to lure settlers to the Pacific Northwest.
- The Great 'Zigzag' of Seattle's Waterfront
In 1876, a frustrated editor took on the city's chaotic street planning, where Commercial Street dead-ended into a 'higgledy-piggledy' row of stores, forcing travelers to detour just to reach the waterfront.