A Railroad Cut Off This Tacoma Mill. Now the City May Give It a New Way In.
The North Shore Lumber Company wants to rebuild its burned plant beyond Old Town, but Northern Pacific condemnation left it without waterfront access. A permit to sluice logs over Alder Street could bring 100 jobs and a 100,000-foot-a-day mill back to the gulch.
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Another great lumber mill will be added to the waterfront by the North Shore Lumber Company if it can obtain an avenue through which to bring its logs to its property in the gulch at North Alder Street, just beyond Old Town.
In federal court recently the Northern Pacific condemned the waterfront land of the mill company, taking a strip which shut the lumber company practically out and cut off its access to the mill site from the sound. The railway had to pay $99,000 in cash to the mill company for the property taken and now it refuses to consider any overtures from the mill people which look to the rehabilitating of a great lumber plant on this site.
There is one avenue left open to the mill property, however, in Alder Street, which runs down over the bluff into the water. This street has never been vacated and if the company can secure a permit for a sluiceway over the street it can still get its logs in from the water and will be able to do business.
A franchise was asked for at the council meeting last week but Judge Stiles told the franchise committee today that the city has no power to grant a franchise to a private corporation. He stated, however, that a permit might be given for a time, until further order of the council.
The councilmen appear to favor this as they desire to see the mill, which burned over a year ago, rebuilt, and there is apparently no reason why the railway company should arbitrarily shut out a big industry of this character which will employ probably over 100.
Tomorrow night the council will likely grant the permit to the North Shore Company and it will at once get busy. If the N.P. attempts to make any trouble the city will have a good club over it for the N.P. must itself have a franchise over this very street before it can build its Point Defiance line.
'We want to build right away and will put in a mill with 100,000 feet capacity a day,' said J. Walker Foster, of the North Shore Company, today. If the project goes through a large boarding house and other buildings will also be built.
“We want to build right away and will put in a mill with 100,000 feet capacity a day.”
The North Shore mill is long gone, but the fight over who controls waterfront access — a railroad, a private mill, or the public street — still shapes Tacoma's industrial and port politics. Then as now, a single permit could determine whether a hundred jobs existed at all.
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