The Ghost of Tacoma's Original Downtown
Before the railroad turned Tacoma into a boomtown, the city's future was fought over by competing pioneers and land speculators.
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.
Tacoma was located about one mile below the present railroad town. Anthony P. Carr, a veteran soldier, settled on Commencement Bay on Christmas Day, 1864. He was the first settler on the bay until Howard Carr joined him. During the excitement of 1869, there was no lack of persons who wished to participate in the anticipated wealth of the future terminal city. Not only were there plenty of would-be settlers, but those innumerable land sharks who were willing to take any advantage they deemed necessary to carry out their schemes. Most of the settlers were poor men; the speculators were men of the world, who knew how to pull the wires to influence the judgment and decisions of wealthy corporations. In January 1869, Anthony P. Carr filed the town plat of the 'Town of Tacoma.' In November 1869, Job Carr, L. M. Starr, James Steele and M. M. McCarver filed the town plat of 'Tacoma City.' These two town plats having monopolized the names, the Tacoma Land Company, when they selected the site for the real terminus town in 1873, were compelled to prefix the word 'New' to the word 'Tacoma' to distinguish it from the prior locations. The principal reason assigned for not finally locating the terminus at the original town of Tacoma was that the Carrs were not pliable enough to accede to the demands of irresponsible speculators who claimed to control the company. By going two miles away to start New Tacoma, a year's work had to be done in clearing and grading; in the meantime, those who settled at the original town with such high hopes in 1873 were starved out.
“Those who settled at Tacoma with so high hopes in 1873, had left the place, been starved out, regarded the whole affair as a bilk.”
The struggle between original settlers and the 'land sharks' of the 1870s mirrors modern gentrification and corporate development, where small communities are often sidelined in favor of centralized infrastructure projects. Today, the 'Original Tacoma' site remains a poignant reminder of how civic history is often written by the parties with the most capital, not those who first broke the ground.
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