The Pioneer Nursery Bringing Life to the Sound
Before Snohomish was a sprawling suburb, it was a frontier canvas for orchards and ornamental gardens seeking to tame the wild Washington landscape.
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 page carries an advertisement for a wholesale nursery offering fruit trees, shrubbery, and herbaceous plants, described as choice selections of all kinds suited to the climate. O. W. Lawton is named as proprietor; the notice appears under the heading "The Largest Nursery," with the type otherwise broken and partly illegible in the OCR.
Beyond that notice, the sheet is given over to business cards and small advertisements: a Portland hop house, a Tumwater bookbinder who sends work to San Francisco, a Seattle shipping and labor intelligence office opposite Colman's Mill, a Snohomish City druggist and a liquor dealer on the same street, a sash, door, and blind factory under Colman's Mill, a blacksmith one door west of the Snohomish station, marble and granite works on Tesler's wharf in Seattle, and a dry goods firm on the Sound advertising Oregon flour, jewelry, and farm produce taken in exchange. No narrative account of the nursery itself appears on the page.
“Choice selection of apple and pear trees that are suited to this climate, and none to equal them.”
Long before Snohomish became known for its historic downtown and modern housing developments, the region's economy was anchored by agricultural pioneers. This advertisement reflects a time when 'making it' in the Pacific Northwest required literal root-work—planting the orchards and nurseries that would eventually define the aesthetic and agricultural character of the Snohomish Valley.
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