Twelve Miles Down, Twelve to Go: Seattle Bets on a Railroad to the Coal Fields
Stockholders reorganized the Seattle and Walla Walla road, re-elected their officers, and then turned on the subscribers who have not paid their bonds — because twenty-four miles of track would open the Cedar River coal and the valley's bottom land.
At a finding [meeting] of the stockholders of the Seattle and Walla Walla Railroad and Transportation Company, held at the company's office last evening, the company was reorganized under the name of Seattle and Walla Walla Railroad Company.
The officers were re-elected, with J. M. Colman as Superintendent. The road is in a prosperous condition, and the rolling stock, fully equipped, will be ready for the transportation of freight and passengers by the middle of December next.
The subscribers to the $30,000 bond fund are delinquent and should make an effort to pay up. A few men should not be left to carry the burden. Every man who takes pride in the prosperity of this city should leave nothing undone to aid in the completion of this important work.
The first twelve miles completed and suitably stocked will insure the building of twelve miles additional during the year 1877. Twenty-four miles of road will put the vast coal fields of the valley of the Cedar river within our reach, and will open up thousands of acres of bottom lands now unoccupied. It will also make the cottonwood, cedar, maple and hazel which abounds in the valley available for the use of our growing manufactures. Let us unite our whole efforts in putting this grand undertaking forward with the least possible delay. — Intelligencer.
“A few men should not be left to carry the burden. Every man who takes pride in the prosperity of this city should leave nothing undone.”
Before the transcontinental line reached Puget Sound, towns built their own railroads on bond subscriptions scraped from leading citizens — and then had to chase the subscribers who quietly failed to pay. The Seattle and Walla Walla never became the great coal road its promoters imagined, but the argument made here, that public money spent on track and freight corridors pays back in land values and industry, has never left Puget Sound. Twenty-four miles to the Cedar River coalfields reads today like a light-rail alignment memo.
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