The Unbuilt Map of Everett
A civil engineer sues the city’s founding land baron for $11,000, claiming he was cheated out of the original survey contract and the right to sign his name to the town’s birth certificate.
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.
An action was begun yesterday in the superior court by Richard Nevins, Jr., against Henry Hewitt, Jr., president of the Everett Land Company, to recover $11,789.50 for an alleged breach of contract and for labor performed. The plaintiff alleges that on June 12, 1891, he entered into an agreement with Hewitt by which he was to be permitted to make the first survey of a plat of the townsite of Everett and was to receive $5 an acre for the work. He was also to have his name alone appear on town maps as engineer and surveyor. He claims that he was refused the right to do this work and that the maps were issued with the names of other parties appearing on them. For this he asks $10,000 damage. A second cause of action alleged is that the plaintiff did engineering work for the defendant amounting to $803. A third cause of action is that he did other work of the same nature worth $989.50.
“He was also to have his name alone appear on town maps as engineer and surveyor.”
Everett was born from speculative land booms that defined the Pacific Northwest in the 1890s. The struggle over who gets to claim the 'authorship' of a city's layout, and the litigious nature of early development contracts, echoes the intense modern debates over urban planning, land-use authority, and the corporate control of Seattle’s rapidly changing neighborhoods.
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