Villard’s Broken Promise to Seattle
After failing to deliver rail service to Seattle, Henry Villard’s company begins pulling up tracks, cementing Seattle’s economic frustration with Tacoma’s rail dominance.
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 removal of iron from the alleged Seattle extension has an ominous look for our northern neighbor. When Mr. Villard was in these parts about a year ago, he made divers promises, among them, that he would ride into Tacoma in September following in a private car from New York; also, that he would continue his journey by rail to Seattle. When he got to Tacoma with his private car, he concluded, for obvious reasons, not to continue his journey to Seattle by rail, but went on board the Queen of the Pacific, leaving his private car behind him at Tacoma, the terminus of the Northern Pacific Railroad. He explained to the Seattleites that he had been unable to keep his promise to them, but laid the blame to Mr. Thielsen. A new promise was then made to have the road completed to Seattle by last November, Mr. Villard undertaking to punish Thielsen in case this last promise should be broken. Like most of Villard’s promises, it was broken. Mr. Thielsen’s punishment is that his son, as road-master, is said to have supervised the removal of iron from the yet unfinished Seattle extension. While we regret that events of recent occurrence seem to indicate the indefinite postponement of the fruition of Seattle's hopes to be made tributary to Tacoma by means of the road afore-mentioned, we are nevertheless glad to note that South Prairie has been discovered to be a convenient point for the storage of railroad iron.
“Like most of Villard’s promises, it was broken.”
This piece captures the deep-seated historical rivalry between Seattle and Tacoma over railroad access, a foundational 'boom' period dispute. It reflects the era's suspicion of monopolistic rail barons like Henry Villard, whose promises of infrastructure often vanished as quickly as the tracks he laid.
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