The Town That Was Blown Up to Save Itself
Leavenworth citizens dynamited the Cascade Hotel to halt a massive inferno, narrowly avoiding a secondary disaster.
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.
LEAVENWORTH, Wash., June 1. The most disastrous fire yet recorded in Leavenworth destroyed four business houses here early yesterday morning. The loss is placed at $15,000. The Cascade hotel was blown up with dynamite to check the further spread of the flames, and by 4 a.m. the fire had burned itself out. Prompt action of the men in blowing up the Cascade hotel saved the entire town from total destruction. The Mercantile company has a cellar in the center of the district burned and this cellar contained a ton and a half of dynamite, which would have killed several hundred people and destroyed the entire town had it exploded.
“The Cascade hotel was blown up with dynamite to check the further spread of the flames.”
Leavenworth's dramatic struggle with fire in 1904 captures the precarious nature of early wood-framed frontier settlements. The 'dynamite solution' remains a grim historical footnote of the era's desperate methods to stop conflagrations before they leveled entire city grids.
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