The Silent Engine Room
A young sawmill worker drowns unnoticed while on the job at Lake Union.
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.
John Cook, a fireman for the Seattle Wood Working Company’s mill at the foot of Brook street on the shore of Lake Union, was accidentally drowned yesterday afternoon at 5:10 o'clock. Cook was alone in the engine room, which stands out over the water, and no one had occasion to visit him before the mill shut down for the day. When the 6 o'clock whistle failed to blow, the men realized something was wrong. Foreman Murdock investigated the engine room and found it empty; spotting a hat floating near a boom log, the crew began grappling the water. Archie Huston recovered the body in twelve feet of water. The watch in Cook’s pocket had stopped at 5:10, marking the moment of his death. It is believed Cook stepped onto a log with a pike pole to retrieve floating wood and fell in. John A. Cook was 21 years old and had moved to Seattle four years ago.
“The body was taken into the mill and by the watch in Cook’s pocket, which had stopped at 5:10 o'clock, it was learned when the accident happened.”
Workplace fatalities were a grimly common feature of 1890s industrial Seattle, especially along the heavily developed, unregulated waterfront. Today, the site of the former mill at the foot of Brook Street (now likely near the current Westlake or Valley street waterfront) is a dense corridor of biotech firms and high-end housing, far removed from the lethal, precarious labor of the sawmill era.
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