The Price of Poverty in 1877 Seattle
When the County Commissioners opened a new poor house, they explicitly designed it as a workhouse to deter the 'dissolute class' from seeking public assistance.
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.
The position of the county poor is at length improved by the County Commissioners, who have wisely decided to construct on the county farm a suitable building for a poor house and hospital. This is to be sixty feet long, one story high, with an addition 24x28 feet. The building is to be constructed and all the material furnished by Messrs. Walter Harmon and George Walker for $1,400 in county scrip. The farm has been leased for one year to Wm. Kanten, he to take care of the poor at 70 cents per day. A poor farm is something this county has long stood in need of. As a home for the poor, no better place could be found; here, by working on the farm, they may become largely self-supporting. The fact is, that with a poor farm like this, where all paupers who are able to work will be made to do so, there will be but few applications for help from the county. There is not a county in the world where a living is so easily obtained as here. With but very few exceptions, those who ask help from the county belong to that dissolute and degraded class of men who never work when they can help it, and who spend all their earnings, when they do work, about the brothels and grog-shops. Yesterday there were four applications made to the County overseer of the poor for help, and the applicants all belonged to this class. They represented that they were all sick, had been unsuccessful hunting for work for a long time, had nothing to eat and no place to sleep. The overseer listened patiently to their pitiable tale, and then coolly remarked: 'Oh, yes, gentlemen, we can help you in a short time. We are having the county farm fitted up very nicely out there, and in a few weeks shall want a number of able-bodied men, such as you, to assist in putting in the spring crop.' They were all taken aback at this, and remarked that they didn't want to go on a farm, but wanted to be boarded here in town.
“The fact is, that with a poor farm like this, where all paupers who are able to work will be made to do so, there will be but few applications for help from the county.”
The 1877 rhetoric framing homelessness as a moral failing of the 'dissolute' rather than an economic issue mirrors the ongoing, centuries-old tension in Seattle politics regarding how the city treats its most vulnerable residents. The shift from offering 'lodging' to forcing labor on a rural work farm underscores a historical preference for punitive, carceral solutions to poverty that still resonates in contemporary debates over homelessness and encampments.
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