Old Town Waterfront Sabotaged
A new stevedoring scow is destroyed in a midnight explosion as labor tensions simmer on the Tacoma docks.
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.
What appears to be a case of malicious persecution came to light last night in the destruction of a lightering scow owned by Lewis Docker, stevedores, who have recently started in business in Tacoma. Shortly before midnight last night an explosion occurred that wrecked the scow and caused a brief reign of consternation on the waterfront in Old Town. The scow was a new one and the donkey engine had just been installed. It was lying at the Old Town mill dock, receiving the finishing touches, and was almost complete. The exact cause of the explosion is not known, but the supposition is that a heavy charge of dynamite had been thrown through the hatch early in the evening and fired by a slow match. Lewis Docker recently came here from Port Townsend to engage in the business of loading and unloading vessels. When the ship Thirlmere was being loaded at the Old Town dock recently, the firm had trouble with the longshoremen, and it is thought that the wrecking of the scow may be the result of bad feeling as the result of that.
“The report was terrific and one end of the scow was completely blown away. This morning pieces of the timbers were found 200 feet from the scow.”
This act of sabotage highlights the volatile nature of labor relations in the early 20th-century waterfront, a time when direct action was common in territorial disputes between firms and unions. Today, the Old Town waterfront has transitioned from an industrial site to a residential and commercial area, but the echoes of these fierce, localized labor fights remain part of Tacoma’s radical history.
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