Seattle Sends Money and Flour to the Widows of Franklin's Dead Miners
After a coal-mine disaster left families in Franklin without breadwinners, the Post-Intelligencer's relief fund and an Olympic Athletic Club benefit kept cash and flour moving to widows and orphans.
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.
The Post-Intelligencer relief fund for the benefit of the Franklin sufferers was steadily reaching the limit, and every day added to the list. The relief committee appointed to aid the families of the dead miners made its report of distribution.
Sixteen sacks of flour were distributed: one sack each to Mrs. Olmstead, Mrs. Anderson, Mrs. Gibson, Mrs. Clemmons, the children of A. English, Mrs. Jonas, Mrs. Hughes, Mrs. Beecher and Mrs. Morris; two sacks each to Mrs. Pugh and Mrs. Johns; and three sacks to Mrs. Hay. Cash payments were also made to Mrs. John E. Jones, Mrs. Isaac Moore, Mrs. L. Pentecost, Mrs. Jacob G. Jones, Mrs. B. Williams, Mrs. Evan Hughes, Mrs. J. O. Anderson, Mrs. S. D. Jones, Mrs. John T. Pugh, Mrs. James O. Gibson, Mrs. Nettie J. Jones and Mrs. Peter May.
The Olympic Athletic Club was preparing a benefit for the fund. The programme included a three-round boxing contest for points between W. A. Carle and George Ling, a lightweight match between Daniel Dean and Ed Pincus, trapeze and tumbling acts by August Delfel and Robert Spencer, a slackwire performance by Eugene Betweiler, and a sketch by P. H. Smith and Lottie Ellis. The club asked participants to be prompt at 7 o'clock Saturday evening and announced that tickets were selling well.
“The relief committee appointed to aid the families of the dead miners has made its report of distribution.”
The Franklin mine disaster was one of the worst in Washington's coal country, and this relief effort shows how newspapers and fraternal clubs stepped in before modern social insurance existed. Today, disaster fundraising is likely to run through GoFundMe and mutual aid—but the underlying question, how quickly a community can reach the families who lost a breadwinner, is unchanged.
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