The Midnight Blaze That Leveled Seattle’s Largest Sawmill
A devastating fire at the Stetson & Post mill in 1885 left 40 men unemployed and destroyed a vital industrial hub, all while a night watchman pointed fingers at a scapegoated worker.
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.
At twenty minutes past four o'clock Sunday morning, a general fire alarm was sounded, and citizens found that Stetson & Post's new sawmill was in flames. It was well-nigh consumed when the alarm was given. The fire department fought for two hours to save the lumber and wharves, but the mill was a total loss. The mill, which had been built two years prior, was the largest in Seattle, with a capacity of 80,000 feet of lumber per day. The origin of the fire remains a mystery. The night watchman claimed he saw a Chinaman, employed to clean up the mill, at work with an oil lamp near the west end shortly before the alarm. When sought out by the owners for questioning, the worker had vanished, leaving only conflicting reports. Mr. Stetson remains resolute: 'If we can collect a considerable portion of our insurance, we will be cutting lumber again in 40 days.' The fire has thrown about 40 men out of employment.
“The light from the flames illuminated the entire city, making it for half a mile around as light as day.”
The Stetson & Post fire mirrors the volatile history of Seattle’s waterfront, where industrial booms and catastrophic fires often reshaped the city’s geography. Today, the tension between labor, migrant worker scapegoating, and the rapid pace of corporate recovery echoes the struggles of an 1885 economy built on timber.
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