The Mysterious Disappearance of a Mill Worker
A search for a Swedish sawyer leads to a grim conclusion after he vanishes from his shift in North Seattle.
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.
Ole Nelson, a sawyer in Green & Ehrlich’s mill at the foot of Wall Street in North Seattle, disappeared mysteriously yesterday morning. Nelson had arrived at 6:00 a.m. to file his saw, but when the mill started at 7:00 a.m., he could not be found. His coat and lunch remained at his workstation. Despite a thorough search with grappling irons in the bay, he was not recovered. Nelson was described as a sober, industrious man of 27 years, with no known relatives in the country. The accepted theory is that he slipped off the front of the wharf and drowned.
“The accepted theory around the mill is that Nelson slipped off the front of the wharf and drowned.”
While the waterfront of 1894 was a place of industrial danger and frequent accidental death, today's Belltown waterfront serves as a stark reminder of how completely the city’s relationship to the shoreline has been transformed from hazardous production to luxury commercial use.
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