The Ghost Town Gambit
A scathing exposé of how the Northern Pacific Railroad manipulated land values and abandoned the established citizens of Yakima City for a new, company-owned townsite.
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.
To the Editor of the Post-Intelligencer: I believe the Northern Pacific Railroad has been guilty of a flagrant breach of its grant, which imposes upon it reciprocal duties and burdens as well as privileges. A most illegal and unjust policy is being pursued with regard to the town of Yakima. No railroad employee can truthfully deny that the company sought to build a new town within sight of the old one, intending to make it the metropolis of Yakima County. In November, leading citizens offered a trust deed for 225 acres of land and 127 town lots to the railroad company, valued at $150,000, if they would only establish the depot in the existing city. Mr. Schulze, representing the company, refused to give it the slightest consideration. He declared the company would build a new town and desired the citizens to desert the homes which the work of a lifetime had made happy and comfortable, to instead help found a new metropolis upon lands owned by foreign speculators and capitalists. Now that the track has been laid beyond our city, the company’s real plan is clear: it is merely a boom to dispose of town lots at the highest possible price. Once that is done, they will move on to Ellensburg, leaving the architecture of our town to decay, while residents are left to deal with the consequences of a railroad monopoly that treats its subjects as pawns.
“The company would build a new town; they... greatly desired the assistance of these men in the effort... all they asked was that the people of Yakima City should desert the homes which the work of a lifetime had made happy and comfortable.”
This 1885 account of a railroad company manufacturing 'boom towns' to extract land value from residents mirrors contemporary struggles in Seattle, where private developers and institutional landlords dictate the urban landscape and housing security. Just as the Northern Pacific played cities against one another for profit, modern residents face displacement due to the concentrated power of corporate real estate interests that prioritize speculative growth over existing community stability.
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