The Rivalry for Sound Trade
A Port Townsend newspaper critiques Seattle's aggressive expansionism and 'booster' mentality in an effort to rally its own merchant class.
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.
With booming prosperity on all sides, and such a brilliant prospect ahead of Port Townsend, it behooves our leading business men to look about them carefully lest they lose advantages that might properly be used to further our interests. Other towns are keenly alive to their interests, and are straining every nerve to gain ascendancy. The key note was sounded recently in a speech at Seattle, in which reference was made to the fact of that city having built steamers and come down the Sound and diverted trade to herself that really belonged to Port Townsend. As we have repeatedly urged, there is no reason why goods cannot be sold here as cheap as in Seattle—indeed they are for the most part—but Seattle merchants a few years ago commenced to undersell, and they thus created a reputation from which they continue to enjoy immense benefits. By sending out their steamers, capturing mail routes, and centering steamboat lines at Seattle, and discriminating in favor of that place in the matter of freight charges, they have attracted trade that would never have gone under ordinary circumstances.
“Other towns are keenly alive to their interests, and are straining every nerve to gain ascendancy.”
This 1881 rivalry between Port Townsend and Seattle captures the early, cutthroat 'growth machine' mentality that defined the Pacific Northwest. Today, the conversation has shifted from steamboat mail routes to Amazon's logistical dominance, yet the anxiety of smaller hubs losing economic autonomy to a central city remains a defining theme of the Puget Sound landscape.
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