The Legislature Tours Everett’s Industrial Dream
Lawmakers arrive in force to inspect the smelters, mills, and barge works of a city banking on being the 'New York of the Sound.'
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.
On March 5, 1893, approximately 800 guests, including members of the state legislature, traveled to Everett at the invitation of the Everett Land Company. The party arrived by steamer and was met with whistles from the bay front. President Henry Hewitt Jr. hosted the delegation, which toured the city’s burgeoning industrial facilities: the nail works, the Puget Sound Reduction Works (smelter), the barge works—where the keel of the whaleback steamer 'Everett' was being laid—and the paper mill. The delegation concluded the trip with a rail tour to Snohomish before returning to Olympia, praising the city’s rapid development and potential to compete with Seattle and Tacoma.
“We have patterned after New York, and I think you will see after you have seen the town that it will not be the big two or the big three cities of the state—Seattle, Tacoma and Spokane—but the big four.”
Everett was the ultimate 1890s boomtown, built entirely on corporate land speculation and the hope of becoming a major metropolis. Today, the struggle to define Everett's economic identity continues, though the 'New York of the Sound' ambition has long since given way to the complex industrial and residential realities of a modern working city.
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