The Great Seattle Fire Burned Their Meat Business. They Rebuilt It Bigger.
Three Montana cattlemen opened a Seattle meat plant just before the 1889 conflagration. Their building was reduced to ashes; within years they were running a regional slaughterhouse and feeding cattle by the thousands.
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.
In 1889, shortly before the great Seattle fire, Charles H. Frye, Charles Bruhn and Frank Frye, three young and pushing cattlemen from Montana, arrived in the city on the look-out for a good business opening. The city was in a fairly prosperous condition, and the three young men put what money they had into a meat establishment. By good management and enterprising business methods the new firm soon became favorably known and was doing a good business when the conflagration which swept out of existence millions of dollars' worth of property burst over their plant and left nothing but ashes. While to many this was a paralytic stroke, yet to Frye Bros. & Bruhn it acted as a stimulus to greater effort and a firm resolve to overcome all obstacles in the fight for a place in their line in the Northwest. As a consequence a new and larger wholesale and retail establishment sprang into existence. Then followed a period of growth during which the business increased to mammoth proportions. The company was recently incorporated with a paid-up capital stock and today is considered one of the solidest firms on the Pacific coast. The company, now known as the Frye-Bruhn Co., buys extensively through Eastern Washington, Idaho and Montana, and at the present time is feeding cattle at Yakima and 7,500 head of sheep. The new slaughterhouse located on Grant Street bridge is a model establishment and is considered the finest in the Northwest. The system throughout is very fine, each department being equipped with the latest improvements. The refrigerator has capacity for holding 200 dressed cattle and stores 300 tons of ice at one time. The purest of ice is used in chilling the meats, which is of the greatest advantage over the use of ammonia by many other companies. So large has the business grown that daily at the slaughterhouse 600 cattle, 1,000 sheep, 150 hogs and 300 calves are killed. The company has eight markets in Seattle, four in Tacoma and shops all over the Sound and state. In various capacities over seventy-five men are employed, which speaks well for the magnitude and importance of the institution.
“While to many this was a paralytic stroke, yet to Frye Bros. & Bruhn it acted as a stimulus to greater effort and a firm resolve to overcome all obstacles in the fight for a place in their line in the Northwest.”
The Great Seattle Fire leveled the young city in 1889, but booster narratives like this one sold Seattle as a place where disaster was only a temporary setback. Frye-Bruhn's rebound shows how thoroughly meatpacking once ran through the city's industrial geography, long before the Grant Street bridge slaughterhouse vanished. Today, as Seattle again argues over industrial land and food systems, the story reads as an early entry in the city's boom-and-rebuild mythology.
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