Jim Hill Finally Names Everett as the Sound Terminus
A contract to build the Great Northern from Everett to Stevens Pass promises 3,000 jobs and a transcontinental line — if the tunnel and the promises hold.
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.
Advices from Seattle say the contract for the construction of the Great Northern Railroad from Everett, on the Sound, at the mouth of the Snohomish River, to Stevens Pass in the Cascades, has been let. The road is to be finished by the end of next year, which probably means the middle of 1893. Then the boring of a tunnel nearly two miles long will consume a year or more longer, so that the entire new transcontinental line will perhaps be finished from stem to stern about 1895. The work, exclusive of the tunnel, will give employment to 3,000 men, and involve an expenditure of a million and a half dollars. The dispatch says that Everett will be the Sound terminus of the Great Northern. The road will, of course, be continued to Seattle, Tacoma and Portland on the south, and Anacortes, Bellingham Bay and British Columbia on the north. It is to be hoped that this news is final. We are getting pretty tired of reading about the 'Sound terminus,' and the pass through the Cascades of Jim Hill's railroad.
“The work, exclusive of the tunnel, will give employment to 3,000 men, and involve an expenditure of a million and a half dollars.”
The Great Northern’s choice of Everett helped remake the Puget Sound economy and settler geography. Today’s fights over rail corridors, ferry terminals and transit hubs are the same argument about which places get connected and which get left behind.
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