The Tragic End of Seattle’s Second-Born White Son
Austin A. Bell, a wealthy real estate developer and son of one of the city's founders, ends his life in a downtown office, haunted by the specter of his father’s mental decline.
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.
At 10:30 o'clock yesterday morning, Austin A. Bell, a prominent real estate dealer and capitalist of this city, killed himself in his office at 252 Front Street with a pistol. H. C. Trumbull, who was in charge of the Japanese goods store next door, heard the report of a pistol followed by the sound of a falling body. He rushed to the street and informed druggist W. H. T. Barnes, who discovered the body after breaking down the office door. Mr. Bell lay with a thirty-eight-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver clutched in his right hand. He had shot himself through the right temple. A letter was found addressed to his wife, expressing deep affection and citing his declining health—specifically chronic stomach disorders and a pervasive fear of inheriting the mental condition that plagued his father, William N. Bell, before his death. Austin A. Bell was the second white child born in Seattle, a man of significant wealth who had been planning to erect a four-story brick building on his property. Despite his social standing and financial success, his lifelong battle with health issues and the 'grim specter' of his father’s mental history led him to take his own life.
“Life in poor health was not worth the living. He, therefore, concluded to end it with a bullet.”
Austin A. Bell’s suicide offers a somber look at early Seattle’s elite. While Bell was a wealthy landholder during the city’s rapid expansion, his personal struggle—rooted in family trauma and the intense pressure of his era's social expectations—mirrors the hidden human costs of the boom-and-bust cycles that have defined Seattle’s development for over a century.
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