The Price of a July Fourth Celebration
A Seattle printer and a child suffer grave injuries from an errant Chinese bomb during the 1872 Independence Day festivities.
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.
The Fourth of July celebration in this city passed off without accident or unpleasant event until late in the evening. When Austin A. Bell, a printer in this office, was looking at the fireworks, he was struck in the mouth by a fragment of an exploded Chinese bomb, which terribly lacerated the lower portion of his face and knocked out all the incisors in his lower jaw, laying the bone bare. He has so far recovered from his wounds as to be up, but it will be some time before he will be in a condition to resume labor. By the same explosion, a young son of Mr. D. Mills was struck, severely burning his face and injuring one of his eyes. His injuries were painful but not permanent.
“struck in the mouth by a fragment of an exploded Chinese bomb, which terribly lacerated the lower portion of his face.”
Fireworks accidents remain a persistent feature of Seattle's Fourth of July, echoing a time when professional displays were less regulated and the physical toll on workers like Austin Bell was reported with a mix of local community concern and grim matter-of-factness.
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