The Unproven Future of the 'Attractive Townsite'
Northern Pacific President Thomas F. Oakes visits the burgeoning town of Everett in 1892, skeptical of its long-term viability despite the optimism of its East Coast developers.
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.
Northern Pacific President Thomas F. Oakes, interviewed in the Tacoma Ledger on March 11, 1892, shared his thoughts on the town of Everett: 'I went down there the other day and found that they had rather an attractive townsite. It has quite a number of things to recommend it, but it has not yet come into competition with Tacoma or Seattle. I was told that the real estate boomers were leaving and that the townsite company were requiring building contracts that prevented speculation, and that not more than one or two speculators were left in the place. What its future will be I do not know nor pretend to say. You will observe this about it from what its promoters say of it: its promise of future growth is based on three manufacturing plants, the money for which is to be furnished principally by the parties interested in the townsite. These parties are not interested in any of these manufacturing lines outside of this place, except in the Steel Barge Company, which some of them own. That business is very profitable in Superior, and I think will be equally profitable here. That is to say, I think the fleet of ships they will manufacture will find lots to do on this coast. But these parties are not interested in the manufacture of nails, or in the manufacture of paper in the East, and they are furnishing the money for these plants as a part of the Everett enterprise. What reason they have to believe that the manufacturing business they will conduct there will be prosperous, I do not know. They may have it all arranged; they are pretty smart men, and possibly they have.'
“I went down there the other day and found that they had rather an attractive townsite. It has quite a number of things to recommend it, but it has not yet come into competition with Tacoma or Seattle.”
Everett was the quintessential 'company town,' established by East Coast titans like Rockefeller to bypass the hegemony of Seattle and Tacoma. Oakes’s skepticism highlights the eternal tension in the Puget Sound region between grand speculative visions and the actual, grinding reality of sustaining industry in a remote frontier.
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