The 99-Year Wait: An 88-Year-Old Tacoma Woman's Multimillion-Dollar Gamble
A three-time widow arrives at a Tacoma clerk’s office with a 99-year-old lease and a meticulously remembered family tree, seeking a slice of Philadelphia.
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.
Tacoma, Aug 23. A woman bearing the appearance of about 60 years of age, active and well-preserved, entered the office of Clerk of Court Abbott this afternoon in company with W. F. Wright, her son-in-law, and asked to make an affidavit as a preliminary step toward beginning a lawsuit. She is 88 years of age and claims to be one of many heirs to an estate embracing 1,100 acres of land covering the very heart of the city of Philadelphia. For two hours, she traced her life through the mazes of relationships and marriages, citing over a hundred names without hesitation. The story: Colonel Israel Baker fought through the Revolutionary War, and a law granted each soldier 160 acres of public domain. Colonel Baker took up his land near Philadelphia. Upon his death, he left no heir other than his brother, Asa Baker. This brother leased the land to a company for a period of 99 years. That lease has now come to an end, and all descendants of the Revolutionary Colonel are moving to claim their share. The claimant, Margaret Foos, was born in Avon, New York, and has been thrice widowed. She arrived here four years ago and lives in the country a few miles from Tacoma. She declares she can read the newspaper without glasses and maintains that she is one of twenty having an equal right in a direct line of descent. Clerk Abbott drew up the statement in legal form to be sent on to Philadelphia.
“She is not crazy. She is so bright and intelligent; her eye, her mind and memory were all so clear as to cause those who heard her tell the story to pause at times and look at the old lady in wonder.”
This 1888 account of a sprawling, decades-long land claim echoes the persistent, high-stakes battles over property value and generational wealth in a rapidly growing, gentrifying city like Seattle. While the scale of the 1,100-acre Philadelphia claim is staggering, the struggle to stake a financial identity in a shifting urban landscape remains a familiar narrative.
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