Seattle's $3 Million Steel Dream on Salmon Bay
A new blast furnace and steel works promised thousands of jobs, a freight-car plant, and 23,000 new residents—if the boosters were to be believed.
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 very gratifying intelligence has just been received that a large blast furnace and steel works plant is to be soon erected in Seattle in connection with the establishment of large freight car building works. This plant will consist of two blast furnaces, with a combined capacity of 50,000 tons per year; an open-hearth steel plant consisting of six thirty-ton furnaces, giving a daily output of 150 tons of steel; a bar mill with an annual capacity of 40,000 tons of commercial bar steel; a plate mill for the manufacture of boiler plate, ship plate and light armor plate up to five inches in thickness; and a cast pipe foundry with a capacity of 10,000 tons annually. This extensive plant will be in every respect of the most modern design and construction, with every appliance for the most economic manufacture of iron and steel. This furnace and steel works plant will cover, approximately, thirty acres on the south side of Salmon Bay, in the city of Seattle.
The company that has arranged to erect this plant had one of the most prominent experts at work for seven months last season in the examination of nearly all the iron ore and coal deposits in the state of Washington and British Columbia, and have selected for their operations the extensive deposits of rich magnetic iron ore upon the main line of the Canadian Pacific Railway, at a convenient distance from their site in this city. The company will also work several other deposits on Vancouver Island, and other islands in the Gulf of Georgia, and also in the state of Washington yielding the most desirable varieties of ores for the manufacture of steel. They have also selected a deposit of very superior coking coal, and will manufacture their own coke.
The examinations made by these experts have covered all the raw material necessary for the manufacture of iron and steel, and have been most thorough and painstaking, and as reported upon, these raw materials are such as to induce some of the most prominent of Eastern capitalists to embark in this enterprise. The money to be expended by this company for plant and working capital will at the beginning be $3,000,000. This will be the largest industrial plant established upon the Pacific coast and is the first of any magnitude to be exploited since the late depression, and therefore speaks highly for the resources and advancement of the Puget Sound country, and is a testimonial, not only to our rich resources, but to our splendid financial and commercial record.
This plant, including the car works to be established in connection therewith, will employ when in running order, from 2,500 to 3,000 men, and it may not unreasonably be expected, with the collateral industries drawn around it, to add 23,000 people to the population of Seattle.
“This will be the largest industrial plant established upon the Pacific coast ... and it may not unreasonably be expected ... to add 23,000 people to the population of Seattle.”
The 1895 steel works was pure boosterism, but it set a template Seattle still follows: sell a vast industrial future, count the jobs, and let the shoreline change. Salmon Bay today is a patchwork of shipyards, houseboats and waterfront development—and the city still argues over what kind of industry, and how much growth, it should make room for.
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