Boomtown Hype Meets a National Hero
General Russell A. Alger visits the booming city of Fairhaven, promising to lobby for a port of entry as speculators dream of rising land values.
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.
Fairhaven was visited yesterday by a party of distinguished gentlemen, including General Russell A. Alger of Detroit and General Hawley of Cleveland. The party were guests of Nelson Bennett, Esq. On their arrival, they were invited to the Chamber of Commerce, where they were met by a committee and escorted around the city. At 10 o'clock, the party boarded the Fairhaven and Southern for a trip to Sedro. Upon their return, an impromptu reception was held at the wharf, heralded by the Casino theatre's brass band playing 'Marching Through Georgia.' General Alger, a prominent soldier and businessman, praised the city’s explosive growth, noting that where a forest stood a year ago, a fine city now existed. He famously told the crowd, 'All a person has to do is to buy a piece of real estate and hang on to it and in a short time he will become rich.' Before departing, he promised to use his influence to help Fairhaven become a port of entry, a vital step for the young city’s aspirations.
“If anything can be born in a minute this is the place that it can be accomplished.”
The boosterism of 1890—where a forest turns into a city in twelve months—is the foundational myth of Fairhaven. General Alger’s advice to 'buy a piece of real estate and hang on to it' sounds uncomfortably like the late-stage gentrification struggles seen in modern Bellingham, where property value inflation remains the primary civic obsession.
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