The Bakeman Block Consumed in Snohomish
A pre-dawn inferno destroys the downtown commercial core, barely sparing city records from the collapse.
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.
Fire broke out at 1:45 o'clock this morning in the basement of Bakeman & Co.'s furniture store in Snohomish. The fire department worked promptly, but within minutes flames burst out all over the building. Rice & Gardner's meat market caught fire, and for a moment it seemed as though all of Front Street would be wiped out. Ten minutes later, the foundation of the Bakeman building caved in, the whole structure lunging with a terrific roar into the gully below, carrying the meat shop and the city fish market with it. Several firemen holding hose in the meat market narrowly escaped being buried alive. The city offices were on the second floor, and so quickly did the fire spread that not a single article could be removed, though the building's collapse fortuitously threw the city records beyond the reach of the blaze.
“The whole structure lunging with a terrific roar into the gully below, carrying Rice & Gardner's meat shop and the city fish market beneath it.”
Early Snohomish was built over ravines and gullies, creating a treacherous landscape for 19th-century firefighting. Modern Snohomish has long since filled in these gullies and stabilized its historic downtown, though the city remains deeply shaped by these early, volatile frontier building practices.
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