The Ghost Town That Wasn't: A Port Townsend Lament
In 1872, the residents of Port Townsend were waiting on a railroad that never arrived, stuck in a cycle of speculation and stagnation.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
This ancient port of entry and commercial emporium still sits at the entrance of Admiralty Inlet waiting, like patience on a monument smiling at grief, for some new thing to occur, either in the shape of a flash of lightning, an earthquake, or a party of railroad surveyors. In the meantime, business of all kinds is nearly at a standstill. When the railroad people have exhausted their resources of humbug and really apply themselves to the work of finishing the road from the Columbia to the Sound, and when the public are assured of the locality where they really mean to terminate the road, then and not till then will we see business revive. Thus far, however, the effect of the railroad movements has been to paralyze all kinds of business on the Sound. The uncertainty has kept capitalists from investing and has only benefited a lot of unprincipled land sharks by allowing them to gull the unwary in buying lots in imaginary terminal cities which looked well on paper but had no existence in fact. When the terminus is decided on, this class of shysters will have to take up some more honest calling.
“The uncertainty has kept capitalists from investing and has only benefited a lot of unprincipled land sharks by allowing them to gull the unwary in buying lots in imaginary terminal cities.”
The 1872 frustration over 'imaginary terminal cities' and the paralysis caused by speculative railroad schemes mirrors the long-standing volatility of real estate development in the Puget Sound region. Today's residents continue to grapple with the same 'land shark' dynamics, as infrastructure promises frequently shape property values and development patterns in ways that leave many locals behind.
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