The 'Pepper Box' Mill in the Wilderness
While critics claimed opportunity for the working man was dead, four shingle weavers built a successful, portable mill in the Everett outskirts.
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 remark is often heard that opportunities for the man with small means to start in business for himself are about gone. Supporters of such a theory would find themselves in deep water if they could visit a small plant in the outskirts of Everett, which is grinding out a good living for its owners regardless of trusts or combinations. If you take the Bicker Ave. car to the end of the line and walk out to 7th and Hoyt, you will find amidst a wilderness of blackened stumps and fallen logs a little shingle mill, noisily humming away. It is an insignificant little thing—the weavers call it the 'pepper box'—and it would just about fill one corner of the average shingle mill of the city. Four men, all practical weavers, own the plant. When L. T. Smith, the filer and manager, announced his intention of building a mill on the 'point' to utilize fallen timber, people laughed and claimed there wasn't enough cedar there to make a door frame. They were wrong. The mill has been in operation for ten weeks and has never lost an hour's time. Smith says when his timber is gone, he can pick his mill up and move it to a new location in three days.
“It is an insignificant little thing—the weavers call it the 'pepper box'—and it would just about fill one corner of the average shingle mill of the city.”
This 1909 story reflects the perennial Everett anxiety regarding corporate consolidation and the feasibility of independent business. The 'portable' nature of the mill highlights how Everett's industrial landscape was once far more fluid and improvised than the massive, permanent mills that eventually came to define the city.
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