The Great Gale of 1878
A rare, unprecedented windstorm tears through downtown Seattle, rattling the nerves and rooflines of the city’s early pioneers.
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 zephyr that prevailed hereabouts all day yesterday and last night was unprecedented in violence by anything hitherto experienced in this section. Warning had been sent from the signal office at Olympia yesterday morning that this portion of the Sound would be visited during the day by a storm of unusual severity; and sure enough, all the afternoon and far into the small hours of the night, the wind swept through the city with a velocity and fierceness never before known by the oldest inhabitants. Hats flew off, signs were blown down, windows were broken, and 'the divil' was to pay generally. The wind gradually died away during the night and was succeeded by light showers. About half-past 5 o’clock last evening, while the gale was at its height, people were startled by the appearance of a huge flame of fire issuing from a chimney at the residence of Thomas Russell, near Cherry and Second streets. The fire burnt with great fury for some time, but finally died out without doing any perceptible damage.
“Hats flew off, signs were blown down, windows were broken, and 'the divil' was to pay generally.”
While modern Seattleites worry about 'Snowpocalypse' or atmospheric rivers, the pioneers of 1878 were dealing with the same vulnerability to extreme Pacific Northwest weather. Even as the city has grown from a cluster of wood-frame buildings near the waterfront to a vertical glass skyline, the local weather remains the city's most reliable headline-maker.
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