The Unseen Economic Power of Puget Sound Timber
A local editor argues that Seattle shouldn't rely on distant furniture imports when the region is literally throwing away the raw materials for a thriving local industry.
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.
An editorial in the last issue of the San Francisco paper contains the following concise deduction respecting our manufacturing opportunities: We may look to Puget Sound as a region where not only shipbuilding, but the manufacture of an almost infinite variety of wooden articles, may successfully be carried on. It seems a little singular that observers at a distance should be more wide awake to our facilities and peculiar advantages in certain lines of business than our own people. With abundance of the finest furniture timber all around us and thousands of cords of it annually being destroyed to get it out of the way, we import a great deal of our common place furniture from San Francisco or the East where the cabinet makers have to import their material from a long distance at cost to them of $40 per thousand. Until lately the San Francisco manufacturers have imported their hard woods from the Atlantic coast via Horn or the Isthmus; lately they have been on our cheaper but equally serviceable furniture woods in addition to our fir, and sending us up the manufactured furniture. All this money might be kept in circulation at home by a little discrimination on the part of purchasers in favor of our local firms who are under way in this line of business. Instead of being importers of wooden fabrics we ought to command the market for all kinds of articles that can be wrought of wood, as widely as our rough lumber now goes, as a department of our export trade.
“With abundance of the finest furniture timber all around us and thousands of cords of it annually being destroyed to get it out of the way, we import a great deal of our common place furniture.”
This 1877 editorial highlights a century-old frustration with Seattle's economic reliance on raw material extraction rather than finished manufacturing. Much like today’s debates about 'value-add' industries and local supply chains, the author argues that the region is literally clearing-cutting its future wealth by failing to invest in local labor and production.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.