Seattle Investors Plan a Boot Factory and Tannery
Before tech and aerospace, Seattle’s business elite plotted to stop shipping raw hides to San Francisco and instead build a city of tanneries and shoe factories.
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.
A movement is now on foot here, headed by a number of our enterprising and moneyed citizens, looking to the establishment of an extensive boot and shoe manufactory and tannery. The business is to be carried on by a joint-stock company with a capital of $50,000. As soon as the preliminary arrangements are completed, a suitable piece of property will be purchased, probably on the southern portion of the city, for the location of the works. Seattle, by virtue of its central location in the heart of an extensive and pre-eminently productive country, possesses every natural advantage for manufacturing enterprise. Hundreds of tons of raw hides are shipped direct from our city to San Francisco each year, where they are manufactured into leather and boots, shoes and harnesses, and then many of them find their way back here again. The fallacy of such a condition of things is apparent. The fact is we should manufacture all the boots and shoes here at Seattle that are used in this Territory, and this we can do if we will. It may be urged as an objection that we do not possess suitable tan-bark. We have been informed by those who have good reason to know, that the bark of our alder is fully equal and in many respects superior to oak for tanning purposes, and that it can be procured here in unlimited quantities.
“The fallacy of such a condition of things is apparent. The fact is we should manufacture all the boots and shoes here at Seattle that are used in this Territory.”
This 1877 report captures a classic 'colonial' economic struggle—the raw-resource exporter wanting to capture the value-add of local manufacturing. It echoes the contemporary friction of Seattle’s evolution from a timber-and-resource town into a global hub, illustrating that the anxiety over 'losing' our economic autonomy to larger regional centers (like San Francisco then, or larger tech hubs now) has been a constant in Seattle's DNA.
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