The Queen City gets a new tugboat
A festive launch of Stetson & Post's new tugboat ends in a brush with catastrophe.
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.
As the evening tide was flooding, a crowd of citizens gathered on Stetson & Post's wharf to witness the launching of that company's new tug. At 10 o'clock the pinning had been knocked out and the boat raised, so the word was given, and as the stately little craft started, Frank S. Stetson broke the bottle of wine over her beam, but as the little fellow was excited, the passengers called out with a cheer, 'Hurrah for the Queen City!' The hurricane deck was illuminated with a row of candles and torches placed at convenient intervals. There was a jump of about four feet from the ways to the water, and the boat plunged far into the welcoming flood which swept over her decks, extinguishing many of the lights. What might have been a painful accident was avoided by almost a miracle. A man named Cameron got his leg entangled in the rope, and had a very lively time extricating it while the boat was going with such speed. The dimensions of the new boat are: Length, 80 feet over all, with a 70-foot keel; 16 feet beam, and 10 feet depth of hold.
“There was a jump of about four feet from the ways to the water, and the boat plunged far into the welcoming flood which swept over her decks.”
Stetson & Post were key players in the timber economy that defined early Seattle. Today, the site of their wharf near the foot of the streets described in the paper has been transformed by the regrades and the expansion of the waterfront, long stripped of its industrial wooden piers.
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