Railroads Fight Taxes on 40 Million Acres
A Chicago editorial rips into railroads for claiming massive land tracts while dodging local taxes, warning that the territory is being sold into corporate feudalism.
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 Tribune says editorially: The land grant railroads are showing their usual stolid contempt for the public by their opposition before the Committee on Public Railroads to the bill requiring them to pay taxes on their lands. That they have the same obligation to contribute towards the maintenance of the community that protects their property, as other citizens do, is an idea that apparently has not yet entered the average subsidized corporation manager's head. The railroads hold, according to Senator Van Wyck, 40,000,000 acres of donation land on which they are evading payment of State and Territorial taxes. They are beginning to lease large tracts of this for grazing purposes. The next step will be that they will possess vast untaxed estates, which they would hold to be rack-rented in the most approved Irish landlord fashion. If they succeed in their scheme to defeat all attempts to make them pay local taxes, we shall have all the horrors of British landlordism reproduced in this country.
“The state of things toward which our land grant roads are dragging us is perpetual ownership of vast landed estates by landlord corporations paying no taxes.”
This 1884 warning about the Northern Pacific Railroad reads like a contemporary op-ed regarding Seattle's current battles over corporate tax obligations and the concentrated ownership of developable land. The fear of 'rack-renting' and corporate land barons echoes through Seattle’s ongoing struggles with housing affordability and the influence of tech giants on local tax policy.
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