A Two-Year-Old's Fatal Fall From an East Seattle Wharf
A two-year-old girl drowns after falling from a Seattle wharf, a grim reminder of the city's rapidly expanding waterfront dangers.
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.
A sad and tragic accident occurred at East Seattle yesterday afternoon. The two-year-old daughter of Mr. and Mrs. S. L. Miller was playing on the wharf when she fell off. Her screams were heard and a passerby rescued the little child. She was nearly suffocated, and all the efforts made to keep life in her body proved futile, and she died later in the afternoon.
“She was nearly suffocated, and all the efforts made to keep life in her body proved futile.”
Early 20th-century Seattle was a rough-hewn boomtown where infrastructure often lagged behind rapid industrial growth, leading to frequent accidents on the city's labyrinthine waterfront. Today, the tragedy of an unattended child on a hazardous pier serves as a poignant reminder of the high human cost paid during Seattle’s frantic, unregulated period of rapid urbanization.
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