A Pioneer's Desperate Claim to the Harbor
An elderly man was jailed for insanity after insisting he owned the entirety of Seattle's tide lands.
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.
Joe With, an old pioneer of this county, was sent to the county jail yesterday upon a charge of insanity and will be given a hearing today before Judge Lichtenberg. The old man is laboring under the delusion that he owns all of the tide lands in the harbor and that the present occupants are simply stealing him out of the property. For a time he was under treatment at Grace hospital, but he became so violent that removal to the county jail was necessary. With has valuable property at Bothell.
“The old man is laboring under the delusion that he owns all of the tide lands in the harbor.”
In the 1890s, the ownership of Seattle's shifting waterfront tide lands was a massive, contentious legal issue that defined the city's growth. This man's 'delusion' was a distorted reflection of a very real and cutthroat civic battle over who held the rights to the city's shoreline.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.