The Great Tacoma Land Grab
A brazen scheme to seize valuable city land by falsely labeling it a 'gold mine' has finally been defeated in court.
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.
Register Mills and Receiver Weity of the Olympia land office have rendered a decision in the long-contested Tacoma school land case in favor of the state. The contest involved 160 acres of section 16, located within Tacoma city limits, for which John G. McBride had filed a mineral land application. The case was tried before the Seattle land office in July, and the testimony spanned four volumes totaling 1,530 pages. The land officers held that while trace amounts of gold were found on the tract, the ore does not exist in sufficient quantities to classify the land as mineral, and it is far more valuable for agricultural and townsite purposes. Witnesses for the state estimated the tract's value at $700,000. It was widely understood in Tacoma that McBride’s intention was to secure the land for its value as urban property, leading to charges that the site had been 'salted' with gold to support his fraudulent claim.
“The endeavor to secure this valuable piece of land on so barefaced a pretext as the one in evidence failed.”
This 1892 scheme to bypass public land regulations by manufacturing a 'mining' pretext echoes contemporary battles over urban land use and development in Seattle. Just as developers then sought to claim public assets for private profit, modern debates over land value, zoning, and speculative investment continue to shape the city's growth.
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