The Boom-Town Pitch: Selling Washington’s Future
In 1877, a local politician’s grand argument for statehood painted Washington Territory as a bustling industrial powerhouse—and a future 'granary of America.'
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 an argument made before the committee on territories in favor of an enabling act for the admission of the Territory of Washington into the Union, the Hon. O. Jacobs provided a comprehensive statement of the region's resources. He described the western half of the territory as a continuous forest, 200 miles wide by 250 miles long, dominated by fir and cedar. With a population of 30,000, the region was already exporting 370 million feet of lumber annually, worth at least $4 million in gold. Jacobs touted the nascent shipbuilding industry on Puget Sound, where 15 vessels were built in the previous year alone, claiming that nowhere else in the world could wooden ships be built so cheaply. He further identified the eastern portion of the Sound basin as an immense coal field, noting that in six years, production had jumped from 1,000 to over 150,000 tons annually. Jacobs predicted that Washington Territory was destined to be the 'Pennsylvania of the Pacific coast.' He also championed Eastern Washington as a prairie country of immense agricultural potential, asserting that once connected by rail, its grain exports would swell into the millions. Arguing for statehood, Jacobs insisted that Washington’s resources and ability to support a government far exceeded that of states like Oregon or Nevada at the time of their admission, urging that the territory was ready to cast off its status as a mere ward of Congress.
“With ore in the greatest abundance and of superior quality, contiguous to the coal-fields, and with forests such as cannot be found elsewhere on this continent, wealth, with a rapidly increasing population, are assured.”
This 1877 pitch reflects the birth of Washington's 'extractive' economic identity. While the terminology has shifted from gold coins and steamships to tech and cloud infrastructure, the city's obsession with its own rapid growth and the promise of being the 'next great global hub' has remained a constant narrative thread for 150 years.
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