The First Engine: How One Machinist Built Seattle’s Heart

The market has not been quite as active during the past week as the week previous. The dealers, however, have had a good run of business in the way of large orders, while there has been an apparent falling off in the way of the smaller retail trade.

LUMBER WAY.— Messrs. Stetson & Post started up their new mill on Commercial Street wharf yesterday for the first time, and the new machinery worked to a charm. It is a fine large two-story building, 48x60, with an addition on the north end for a boiler and drying room, 11x40 feet in size. The second story contains a small lot of machinery, and is intended to be used as a finishing apartment. Directly opposite this, over the boiler and engine room, in the addition, is the drying or seasoning room.

There is a large loft over the finishing apartment, which has just been stowed full of seasoned material to be worked up the coming summer into sashes, doors and blinds. We also noticed here a large amount of made-up stock, ready for the summer trade, including some fifteen hundred sashes and five hundred doors, made up at the old establishment on Mill Street.

The fine new engine is the principal object of attraction though, and was put to work yesterday for the first time. It is a large, very compact horizontal engine, with a twenty-inch stroke and cylinder. It is the first engine ever built in Seattle. The design was conceived, the plans drawn up and the engine made entirely by the machinist, Mr. Bullene, who is without a peer in that line, in the territory, and it runs like clock work.

The industry in which these gentlemen are engaged has become one of the principal ones of the city; but it was started in a very small way and has gradually grown to what it now is. One year ago last June, these two young men, possessed of a moderate amount of capital, commenced manufacturing sashes and doors in a small way in the building at the head of Yesler's wharf. They had a small planing machine, and their machinery all told might have been carted off in a truck wagon. They employed 10 help for some time, and worked incessantly from early morning until late at night.

Their business grew in their hands; and every month or so they added some new machinery to their stock, and finally found it necessary to employ considerable help. Now they employ 10 or 12 hands, having an establishment, molding the property on which it is situated, the machinery and stock worth at least $50,000 cash.

The doors and sash are in every respect preferred to those manufactured from white pine at San Francisco, for the reason that they are more durable, do not swell and shrink as the latter do.