The Skagit County Seat Heist
A secret 'Business Men’s Association' in Anacortes hatches a high-stakes campaign to pilfer the county seat from Mount Vernon, complete with paid-off laborers and promises of a grand courthouse.
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.
Skagit county promises to furnish one of the liveliest county seat fights this fall ever seen, and the skirmishing has already commenced. The citizens of Anacortes have been looking with hungry eyes toward the big plum, and over a month ago they organized themselves into a secret club under the name of the 'Anacortes Business Men's Association,' with the single object of securing the county seat. The first public move of this association was a circular letter sent to every lot owner in the city requesting an assessment of $5 per lot to create a campaign fund. The letter stated: 'The fight will be a hot one, but we can assure you of its successful termination, provided the necessary encouragement is given us.' The association claims that politics are not involved; they are a unit with one purpose. There is considerable opposition already manifested toward the assessment scheme, but if that plan fails, the leading officials in the Northern Pacific and Oregon Improvement Company have signified their willingness to put a lot of laborers at work here in time to make them voters. Petitions are already in circulation at Hamilton, La Conner, and other places to ask for a vote of the people upon the question. Anacortes, however, has more money to spend than any of the other towns and she will spend it lavishly, believing that it will all come back when their $100,000 courthouse is built.
“The citizens of this place have been looking with hungry eyes toward the big plum.”
County seat battles were the 'real estate development' drama of the 1890s, where corporate interests and town boosters essentially manufactured civic identity to drive up land values. Today’s debates over urban density and annexations echo these 19th-century fights over where the power—and the tax revenue—is physically located.
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