Ten Cents a Seat: Seattle Packs Madison Park for the Widows and Orphans of Franklin
Thousands turn out at the Madison Park resort for a benefit performance — a comedy-drama of the Underground Railroad, an Oriental specialty troupe, and a dime admission — with every cent going to the families of the Franklin miners.
The people of Seattle have responded to the call for aid for the Franklin miners and thronged to the Madison Park resort yesterday afternoon and evening by the thousand. The entertainment given for this worthy cause is well worth the price, but the admission is only 10 cents. It is the grandest show of the kind ever put on a stage in Seattle. The "Underground Railroad" is a comedy-drama which abounds in musical and specialty features. The entire play is on moral lines and every propriety is observed. The company is thoroughly organized and includes ladies and gentlemen of high attainments in the profession. Their delineations of the trials and tribulations of fugitive slaves on the "Underground Railroad" before the war are startlingly realistic, and wherever it has been presented it has been witnessed by crowded houses. Kukino's Oriental troupe are better than ever in their new specialties. The admission to this great show is 10 cents, the proceeds of which go to the widows and orphans of Franklin. Performances every afternoon and evening until Sunday next, at 8 o'clock.
“The admission to this great show is 10 cents, the proceeds of which go to the widows and orphans of Franklin.”
Franklin, in the King County coal country near Black Diamond, had just lost dozens of men in the mine fire of August 1894, and Seattle answered the way it still does: with a packed house and a dime a head. The coal towns that fed this city's furnaces are gone now, but the reflex — a city turning a night out into relief for families in a company town — is entirely recognizable.
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