Fatal Mill Accident at Port Discovery
A worker dies after becoming entangled in industrial machinery, highlighting the extreme dangers faced by laborers in the Puget Sound timber industry.
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.
A man named Peter Harring was caught in a belt and carried around the shaft in the mill at Port Discovery, according to a Port Townsend dispatch. He died about two hours after the accident.
The mills at Port Discovery shut down last evening and will be idle several weeks.
“A man named Peter Harring was caught in a belt and carried around the shaft in the mill at Port Discovery yesterday.”
This 1885 account of a workplace fatality in a Port Discovery mill captures the grim reality of the industrial era in Washington, where life and limb were often sacrificed to the speed of production. It serves as a stark reminder of the labor struggles and safety campaigns that eventually transformed Washington’s dangerous mill culture into the regulated workplaces of today.
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