A Farewell to the Queen City
Former pastor reflects on his departure from Seattle and his new post in Salem.
The elements seemed determined to keep us from leaving Seattle. The fog and smoke of Thursday morning, Sept. 6th, are to me memorable as the thickest weather I ever saw. The Emma Hayward ran afoul of a ship lying at anchor before she got out of Elliott Bay. More than once she touched bottom on her way to Tacoma, and at that place the look out could not see the wharf until within a few feet of it. We reached Kalama on time, but found no boat awaiting us to take us to Portland. We waited in this uninteresting town seventeen hours. We hold an impromptu levee at our hotel, where numerous Illinois friends of 'auld lang syne' called upon us. Seattle has the energy and rustle of a great commercial centre—as it is—while Salem has rather more of the quiet atmosphere of the academic groves in Athens where Plato loved to meditate. But our home by the sea in the 'Queen City' of Puget Sound possessed rare charms for us, and we certainly cannot hope to find a pleasanter one until we dwell in the one not made with hands, eternal in the heavens!
“Seattle has the energy and rustle of a great commercial centre—as it is—while Salem has rather more of the quiet atmosphere of the academic groves in Athens.”
Harrington’s description of Seattle’s 'energy and rustle' compared to Salem’s 'academic groves' captures the city’s early transition from a rugged frontier port into a booming commercial hub. His account of the treacherous, fog-choked navigation of Elliott Bay highlights the raw, pre-infrastructure reality of 1883 Puget Sound travel, long before modern aids made the Sound a safer passage.
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