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Seattle Bets Half a Million Dollars on a Canal

With $50,000 left to raise, the subscription to build the ship canal becomes the town's favorite proof that Seattle is a city of doers.

SEATTLE IS CERTAINLY ALL RIGHT.

La Conner Mail: The South canal subsidy is slowly but surely drawing to a close, as but $50,000 more is needed to make up the requisite $500,000. Seattle is all right, so are her citizens.

NOTHING THE MATTER WITH SEATTLE.

Chehalis Nugget: Seattle has been raising a half-million dollars subsidy for the building of a canal. There is nothing the matter with any town, East or West, that can do that in these times.

The Ladd estate has donated $25,000 worth of land to the canal subsidy. This is a splendid example to other owners of property in and about Seattle.

“Seattle has been raising a half-million dollars subsidy for the building of a canal. There is nothing the matter with any town, East or West, that can do that in these times.”

— Printed in The Seattle Post-Intelligencer (Seattle, Wash. Terr. [Wash.]) 1888-1914, 1895
Then · 1895131 years apartNow · 2026

Long before federal money reshaped the waterfront, Seattle's business class pooled a half-million dollars by private subscription to dig the canal that would link Lake Washington to tidewater. The boast — that no town doing this could be in trouble — is the same civic boosterism that now attaches to stadiums and megaprojects, complete with the pressure on landowners to donate.

The original page

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer (Seattle, Wash. Terr. [Wash.]) 1888-1914, 1895-04-30. Library of Congress, Chronicling America.

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About this story

From
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer (Seattle, Wash. Terr. [Wash.]) 1888-1914, APR 30, 1895, Page 4
Text
Cleaned up from the page — spelling and layout repaired — not a word-for-word transcription. The page itself is above, for exact wording.
Rights
Public domain
Place
47.60323, -122.33028 · placed automatically
The paper in the Library of Congress catalog ↗