Utsalady Bay's Dream of a Great City
An 1890 advertisement pitches the deep-water harbor of Utsalady as the inevitable next metropolis of the Pacific Northwest.
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.
Many small towns will go right ahead, and a few of them, on account of their more fortunate location, will undoubtedly make rapid progress in the near future. Such a place, for instance, is Utsalady. I do believe that if a town had been started on that beautiful harbor in Utsalady Bay ten years ago, it would have been the largest city on the Sound today. The location is a commanding one, its resources are immense. The oldest settlements, the finest farms, the biggest timber—up in that vicinity is where you will find it. The famous Skagit and Stillaguamish valleys, with their wealth of timber, coal, iron, marble, asbestos, silver, copper and other precious minerals, are directly tributary to Utsalady, which is practically the only deep water harbor and shipping port for that region. Utsalady is a great steamboat center already, and I notice the railroads are also heading for Utsalady. In my opinion it is a good place to invest.
“I would much rather take my chances in one of those young, vigorous towns than in the older ones, where values are already pretty high.”
In the late 19th century, Seattle’s growth was not yet a foregone conclusion, and speculators often bet on smaller, natural deep-water harbors like Utsalady to become the region's primary hub. Today, Utsalady remains a quiet, rural community on Camano Island, serving as a reminder of how quickly civic fortunes shifted during the rapid industrial expansion of Washington State.
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