The Peril of the Eleventh Street Grandstand
A foreman's decision to add weight to an already overloaded scaffold leads to a dangerous collapse at the Tacoma baseball grounds.
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.
By the giving way of a scaffold on the new grandstand at the Eleventh street baseball grounds, George Goble had both bones of his right leg broken. Two men were piling up lumber on the scaffold when the contractor arrived and warned them to be careful of the load. Later, the foreman went up on the structure himself, putting more weight on the already overloaded plank. A moment later, the scaffold crashed, dropping the foreman and Goble ten feet to the seats below. Goble was the only one seriously injured.
“Noticing that the men were in danger, he called to them to be careful and not overload the scaffold.”
This incident at a historical Tacoma landmark—the Eleventh Street baseball grounds—serves as a early 20th-century reminder of the persistent need for workplace safety oversight and the consequences of ignoring structural capacity.
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