The Great Seattle Land Rush: How 1890 Rewrote the Map
Newly unearthed records from 1890 show a city transforming through massive real estate speculation, where plots bought for hundreds were suddenly worth tens of thousands.
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.
Real estate transfers in Seattle and King County for the year ending December 31, 1890, aggregated $23,387,727.80. This record exceeds any in the history of Seattle. During the past six months, there has been a total subsidence of the speculative element in the market, with sales restricted largely to the purchase of property for improvement. There has been a steady advance in the value of better classes of property, both business and residence. The most notable transaction involves Maurice McMicken selling 3,000 acres to the South Seattle Land Company for $600,000; records disclose that Mr. McMicken bought this same property in 1887 for just $9,851.32. Similarly, Amos Brown sold property on Second Street for $72,500—land that had been purchased for a few hundred dollars in the 1850s. As owners shift from speculating to building, the city finds itself in a new era of permanence.
“This great advance in the aggregate of transactions is a most significant evidence of the solid basis of Seattle realty.”
The 1890 obsession with land value appreciation and the rapid conversion of wildlands into platted 'additions' marks the birth of the modern Seattle development machine. Today’s city, grappling with housing affordability and extreme density, still traces its primary structural conflicts back to these original land-grab cycles.
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