Bothell Mill Destroyed in Spectacular Blaze
A major shingle and lumber mill goes up in flames, leaving the community with a $75,000 loss.
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.
Nearly the whole of the Fleming & Ayerst Company’s shingle and lumber mill at Bothell was destroyed by fire yesterday morning, and one man, whose name could not be learned, was badly burned. The fire began in the fanhouse about 10:30 in the morning, and in a few minutes spread throughout the mill and completely enveloped it in flames. The employees and citizens generally worked valiantly to save as much of the property as possible, and one of them was badly burned about the head in doing so. They only succeeded in saving the machine shop, office and boarding houses, the mill and dry houses being all destroyed. The buildings, machinery and stock were valued at about $75,000, the stock being worth $6,000. The insurance aggregated about $30,000.
“The fire began in the fanhouse about 10:30 in the morning, and in a few minutes spread throughout the mill and completely enveloped it in flames.”
Bothell transitioned from a resource-extraction mill town into a suburban and academic hub for the University of Washington-Bothell campus. Fires in timber mills were a frequent, catastrophic risk for early Seattle-area settlements as the local economy built itself on the regrading and harvesting of the landscape.
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