The Mortgage Hangover: Seattle’s Post-Fire Reckoning
A federal census agent tallies the heavy toll of reconstruction, revealing how the city’s rapid rebuilding after the Great Fire of 1889 fueled a massive wave of high-interest debt.
The story, cleaned up
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Mr. John A. C. Gosewisch, the special census agent for collecting data in regard to the recorded indebtedness of Washington, has just completed his work. 'We found that a good many of the King county mortgages were filed since the fire by men who borrowed money to rebuild. A good deal of this money was gotten at high rates of interest,' he noted. Across the state, 58,101 mortgages were recorded between 1880 and 1890, with King County alone accounting for 8,951. Gosewisch estimated that King County’s total recorded debt fell between twenty-five and thirty million dollars. While he estimated that 75 percent of those mortgages had been paid off, he admitted that many residents were reluctant to disclose their financial straits to the government, with some stating the reasons for their loans—ranging from marriage to whisky—were 'nobody's business but their own.'
“Some people said that the reason for taking out the mortgage was nobody's business but their own.”
In 1891, Seattle was literally building itself out of the ashes of the Great Fire, leaning heavily on high-interest loans to modernize. Today, as the city navigates its latest cycle of explosive growth and housing instability, that 1891 scramble to finance a new skyline serves as a stark reminder that Seattle’s 'boom-bust' identity has always been staked on the volatility of credit.
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