The Crooked Streets and Forested Hills of 1874 Seattle

H. C. Jones, a well-to-do citizen of Pittsburgh, Pa., and a former resident of Seattle, is a guest at the Northern Hotel, arriving in the city yesterday after an absence of twenty-one years. In 1874 he came west from Pennsylvania over the Union Pacific and the Southern Pacific to San Francisco, and from there he took a steamer to Portland. In another steamer he went down the Columbia River to Kalama, and there he boarded the branch railroad, which had been built a short time before, and rode to Tacoma. Tacoma was not much of a place then, and he came on to Seattle, arriving by boat. Concerning his residence here he said last evening: 'Seattle was then a place of about a thousand people, I should judge, and the streets were the crookedest I ever saw, and some of them so narrow they were not called streets at all. On the hill there was a forest where there are now residences by the block, and, in fact, the change is so great that it seems almost incredible. I came out to this country with D. W. Jones, a civil engineer from Pittsburgh, who took charge of the Newcastle coal mine, run by the Seattle Coal & Iron Transportation Company, with headquarters in San Francisco. I lived at Franklin a short time, working as an accountant under Mr. Jones, who was superintendent, and I think I will take a run out there and see what the place now looks like. In those days we reached the lake, where the park is now located, by a stage line running from Seattle. We would go across the lake on boats to Newcastle landing and from there ride on coal cars, or, what was more comfortable and fashionable, walk to Newcastle. The coal was then towed around on scows to Lake Union and put in bunkers at the foot of Pike Street. The bunkers there were built while I was in Seattle, and I helped to put them up. In walking about I recognize only a few names on the business houses that are familiar to me as old-timers. Dexter Morton, I see, has a bank at the same corner that he was located on in those days. I took a ride around the lake today and found that there were several parks and other evidences of improvement that speak well for the energy and prosperity of the people here. I was in Seattle during the winter of 1874-5 and was here again in 1876, but I went back to Pittsburgh that year and have lived there ever since, this being my first visit West during that interval.' Mr. Jones is taking a little recreation in travel and has abandoned business for a short time. He will remain in Seattle two or three days and then go South.