The Town Held Hostage by the Railroad
When the Northern Pacific Railroad bypassed an established town to create a company-owned rival, the residents were left in a fight for their city’s survival.
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.
The Yakima City trouble is only one manifestation of the policy of intimidation advertised by the Northern Pacific company. Wherever they have passed the established towns which had given value to their line, they have sought to create a new one located upon lands owned by the company or by means of their favorites. Portland is the only city which has escaped a repetition of this railroad plan. Every other town on the line has been crushed by the company, or been forced to submit to railroad mandates to avoid it. This effort to "move" Yakima is the latest and boldest attempt of this kind. There is a well-established town of a thousand inhabitants so completely ignored by the company that trains run directly through it without stopping to deposit their freight and passengers at the depot of a railroad town three and a half miles away. The latter has no existence save in the mind of the speculator. Out of their kindness of heart, however, the railroad owners of the new town have offered a lot free to all residents of the old town who would come to swell the population of the new. Many of the Yakima people availed themselves of this offer; greater numbers, however, did not, some being unwilling and others unable to move. So the two towns live in a rivalry which cannot but be disastrous to Yakima county.
“If the Northern Pacific made it an easy matter to move Yakima in the manner attempted, no town or city in the Northwest could feel secure.”
This 1885 account of corporate town-building versus organic civic development echoes contemporary debates about private companies dictating the geography of our cities. The struggle against railroad monopoly power in the Washington Territory remains a clear ancestor to today's anxieties over how large corporations shape the housing and transit landscapes of the Puget Sound.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.