The Tragedy at the Stetson-Post Mill
A three-week-old boy was discovered floating in Seattle’s waters, a stark and somber reminder of the hidden precarity and desperation in the city’s frontier industrial era.
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 body of a dead infant was found floating in the bay near the Stetson-Post mill yesterday morning. It was that of a boy, apparently two or three weeks old, and bore the appearance of having been murdered. It was wrapped in a folded bed sheet and was to all appearances a healthy child. The lower part of the legs were eaten off by crabs, and the top of the head bore a scar about the size of a silver quarter. Its skin was white and its hair dark. There is no clue to the paternity or who murdered the infant. Coroner Horton took the dead body to Bonney & Stewart’s, from which place it will be buried.
“The lower part of the legs were eaten off by crabs, and the top of the head bore a scar about the size of a silver quarter.”
In 1892, Seattle’s waterfront was a rough industrial hub where a foundling’s death could go tragically unsolved. Today, that same area—once dominated by lumber mills—is home to the Seattle Waterfront Project and the Olympic Sculpture Park, reflecting the city’s total transformation from a resource-extraction outpost to a global urban center.
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