Seattle’s Iron Dream: The $3 Million Plant That Promised to Remake Puget Sound
In the wake of a depression, boosters announced a blast-furnace and steel-works complex on Salmon Bay — plus a freight-car factory — predicting thousands of jobs and 25,000 new residents.
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 market for iron and steel on the Pacific coast is larger in proportion to population than in any other section of the United States, owing to rapid settlement, mining, lumbering, and the region’s railway mileage. Puget Sound is the only region on the coast with a cheap and abundant fuel supply and iron-ore deposits situated for cheap transport to a common point. It must, the article argues, become the center of iron manufacturing on this coast.
The gratifying intelligence has just been revived that a large blast furnace and steel works plant is to be erected in Seattle in connection with large freight-car building works. The plant will consist of two blast furnaces with a combined capacity of 80,000 tons per year; an open-hearth steel plant with six thirty-ton furnaces, giving a daily output of 180 tons; a bar mill with an annual capacity of 40,000 tons of commercial bar steel; a plate mill for boiler plate, ship plate, and light armor plate up to five inches thick; and a cast-pipe foundry with a capacity of 10,000 tons annually. It will cover approximately thirty acres on the south side of Salmon Bay, in Seattle.
The company has examined iron and coal deposits in Washington and British Columbia and selected high-grade magnetic ore on the line of the Canadian Pacific Railway, along with a superior coking coal. Prominent Eastern capitalists are backing the enterprise. The money to be spent for plant and working capital will at the beginning be $3,000,000. This will be the largest industrial plant established on the Pacific coast and the first of any magnitude exploited since the late depression.
In running order the plant and connected works will employ from 2,500 to 3,000 men, and with collateral industries it may add 25,000 people to Seattle’s population.
The company will also establish an extensive freight-car manufacturing plant in connection with the iron and steel works. It will have a capacity at the beginning of ten cars a day, readily increased. The advantages are striking: Puget Sound fir is considered the best car lumber in the world and is much cheaper here; eastbound tonnage can carry the finished cars east at little cost. With iron and steel made cheaply at Seattle, the car builder would have an advantage of from $75 to $100 per car over Eastern builders.
“Puget Sound must undoubtedly become the center of iron manufacturing on this coast.”
Seattle has repeatedly bet its future on landing the next big industrial employer, from iron and steel to aircraft and software. The Salmon Bay site is now part of the city’s working waterfront and ship-canal corridor, a reminder that growth promises often outrun what gets built. The article’s equation of a single plant with 25,000 new residents still echoes in today’s debates over major employers and housing capacity.
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