The Shoemaker of Front Street
A quiet tragedy in a small storefront captures the desperate pride of a laborer working through the final stages of illness.
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 remains of Charles Lett, the shoemaker who died Tuesday night after a long illness of consumption, will be buried this afternoon from Bonner & Stewart's undertaking rooms. Lett was 32 years of age and kept a little shoemaker shop at the corner of Front and Virginia streets. He was in poor circumstances, but rather than submit to the humiliation of accepting charity, he struggled along and continued to work day after day to earn bread for his wife and two little children until he finally became so weak that he actually could not keep it up any longer and last Monday was forced to yield to the disease. He had been sick for over a year. His friends are taking up a collection to defray the expenses of decent burial for the remains and to assist the wife and children.
“He struggled along and continued to work day after day to earn bread for his wife and two little children until he finally became so weak that he actually could not keep it up any longer.”
In 1892, a shoemaker died in his shop on the waterfront—an area now largely consumed by the Pike Place Market and luxury retail. His struggle highlights the lack of a social safety net in 19th-century Seattle, a resonance that persists as the city grapples with the modern precarity of the working class and the rising costs of basic survival.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.