The Great 'Pauper' Row of 1892
When Seattle and Tacoma accused each other of shipping their 'indigent sick' across the sound, the city’s health officer stepped in to set the record straight.
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.
Health Officer Sparling said yesterday that there was no truth in the statements of City Physician Goddard, of Tacoma, published a few days ago in Tacoma dispatches, that the Seattle authorities are sending their indigent sick to Tacoma. He continued: 'The article states that thirty patients were treated at the city and county hospitals in Tacoma, while in Seattle eight were treated in a similar institute. Whether the word institute was intended to refer only to the city patients, or to the county patients, or both, is hard to say; but the hospital service for the city of Seattle in December, 1891, was as follows: patients admitted during month, nine; number remaining from November, four; thus making a total of thirteen. The number treated by the county is a different matter, yet I know that there were fifty-two persons at the county farm and several more county cases in the hospitals.' It is a fact that Seattle is the point to which the majority of those who are sick or afflicted come for treatment from all points along the Sound. We investigate the case of every person who applies for aid from this department. If care was not taken, the city would have more on its hands than it would care to support. If Tacoma accepts vagrants who are driven from Seattle by the police, it is unjust to say that the authorities are unloading their indigent sick upon that city. Dr. Sparling concluded by saying that on several occasions men had applied for aid and, on being questioned, said that they came from Tacoma and had been sent to Seattle by the authorities.
“If Tacoma accepts vagrants who are driven from Seattle by the police, it is unjust to say that the authorities are unloading their indigent sick upon that city.”
More than 130 years later, the friction between Puget Sound cities regarding the responsibility for unhoused and indigent populations remains a recurring, unresolved tension in regional politics. Just as in 1892, municipalities still grapple with the optics and logistics of health services, often devolving into circular accusations of 'exporting' poverty.
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