The Boomtown Pulse of 1876
A booster’s-eye view of a rapidly industrializing Seattle, where housing was cheap, the bay teemed with fish, and laborers arrived by the steamer-load.
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.
Seattle is now at that stage where the influx of population makes the following report of interest to our city: the inhabitants number three hundred in the town itself, and more in the immediate vicinity. New buildings are going up in every direction. The city is lighted by gas, and although wood is cheap, much coal is consumed in furnaces, homes, and dwellings. The townsite is naturally beautiful, lying in the form of a great amphitheatre. Being on the Sound, the inhabitants have the benefit of the sea-breezes. Living is cheap, very good board being provided for twenty-five cents a meal. The Sound abounds in fine fish; salmon and the numberless other choice fish which literally swarm in the Sound are plentiful and cheap.
“Living is cheap, very good board being provided for twenty-five cents a meal.”
This 1876 dispatch captures Seattle at a literal frontier scale, yet the preoccupation with rapid population growth, housing demand, and the city's 'amphitheatre' geography rings with eerie familiarity to today's residents. While the price of a meal has shifted from a quarter to the price of a latte, the cycle of developers building 'in every direction' remains the city's defining, and often contentious, heartbeat.
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