Suspicious Blaze Destroys Inglewood Schoolhouse
A rural schoolhouse on the east side of Lake Sammamish is lost to a fire that trustees suspect was deliberately set.
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 schoolhouse at Inglewood, on the east side of Lake Sammamish, was burned about midnight on Thursday night and is a total loss. It was limitedly insured in the North British and Mercantile. Some circumstances connected with the fire have given rise to the suspicion that it was of incendiary origin. For some time, the trustees have been holding school in the townsite building on the lake, about two miles distant, but about three weeks ago they decided to remove to the old building and began preparing it for occupancy. All that was saved were some desks which had not yet been removed from the townsite building.
“Some circumstances connected with the fire have given rise to the suspicion that it was of incendiary origin.”
While Inglewood is no longer a distinct town, the area remains a part of the greater Sammamish/Redmond landscape. The suspicion of arson in a small rural schoolhouse reflects the deep-seated anxieties of 1890s frontier communities over public property and community cohesion.
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