County Money Drained Into a Doomed Bank — and an Effigy on Dock Street
A Whatcom banker stands accused of steering $50,000 in county funds into a failing institution, while angry citizens string up a stuffed likeness of him on a telegraph pole.
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.
WHATCOM, April 18.—[Special.]—The preliminary hearing of Banker Waldron, on the charge of having received $50,000 of county funds for deposit in the Whatcom County bank when he knew said bank was in failing circumstances, was to have commenced at 10 o'clock today, but has been postponed until the same hour Saturday, at the request of the citizens' committee appointed at the Monday evening mass meeting.
Yesterday afternoon the fixtures and safes in the office of the Bank of Fairhaven were attached and left in the custody of a special officer. The committee referred to met Mr. Waldron and his attorneys yesterday and obtained Waldron's version of the affair, which is substantially as has already been reported in the Post-Intelligencer.
The county commissioners and attorneys are not inclined to be very communicative about the matter. The county attorney said today: 'We are not trying our case in the public prints and are not talking much about it. But I think that when the time comes the people will find us ready, and will find further that we are right. Where it will end I cannot say. It is a bad state of affairs — very bad. The commissioners and their advisers have acted in good faith throughout and have done everything in their power to protect the credit of the county. We know the facts and they will all appear in time. Suffice it to say now that they are of such a character as to fully convince us that this is a deliberately connected plan on the part of Waldron to hold up the county and, to put it in the mildest possible way, shirk his responsibility on a private transaction with the treasurer. It is not our fault if he made a bad deal. I believe that if it had not been for the action the commissioners took in December, and out of which this trouble has come through no fault of theirs, county warrants would not now be worth fifty cents on the dollar.'
During the night some persons hung to a telegraph pole on Dock street a grotesque stuffed figure labeled 'G. W. Waldron.' Some irresponsible and hot-headed persons still talk of violence, but there is little sympathy for it, it is thought.
Waldron's office safes were attached in the hope of securing important papers bearing upon the matter, and especially a considerable number of notes for a large amount in the aggregate, which Waldron says he received from the treasurer for collection. Some are for taxes and some for borrowed money. All are overdue and interest unpaid. Most of them are against well-known citizens and particular friends of the treasurer, who are now on the anxious seat with Waldron and the officials concerned. Waldron seems indifferent about the attachment of the safes and will not say whether the notes are in them, or whom they are against.
“It is a bad state of affairs — very bad... county warrants would not now be worth fifty cents on the dollar.”
This is a classic boomtown bank failure: county tax money entrusted to a private institution that had already gone shaky, then the collapse and the scapegoat hunt. The county attorney's fear that warrants would fall to fifty cents on the dollar is the nineteenth-century Northwest equivalent of a municipal credit downgrade — and the effigy on a pole shows how quickly financial panic turned into public rage.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.