Fire on the Hill: A Seattle Neighborhood in Peril
A mid-day blaze destroys homes and leaves a neighbor seriously injured, highlighting the isolation and scarcity of water in the city's expanding residential districts.
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.
About 11 o'clock this forenoon the city was again startled by an alarm of fire. This time the fiend had fixed upon a group of handsome residences on the crest of the hill in the vicinity of I and Eighteenth streets. The pull up the hill was a long and a strong one and the ladder truck did not reach the scene until one of the houses was consumed and another so far gone that no efforts were of avail to save it, but the third house was rescued, though severely burned on one side. The fire originated, according to the story of the neighbors, in the middle house, a two-story dwelling owned by P. W. Hanson, of Swezy & Kahler's drug store, and was at the time unoccupied. The first intimation the neighborhood had of the fire was huge volumes of smoke issuing from the crevices of the windows. Efforts were made to save the structure, but the heat became so intense they were compelled to abandon it. The wind was blowing from the south and the flames leaped across the intervening space, a distance of about thirty feet, and ignited the residence of E. T. Smith, nightwatchman at The Tacoma, on the north corner of the block. In that vicinity, water is hard to get, having to be drawn from wells, and owing to the difficulty in securing water, the wonder is that even that much of the group was saved. The other two houses were burned to the ground. As it was, the horse attached to Darling's delivery wagon became frightened, and plunging through the crowd ran over a Mrs. Lots, the wife of a carpenter in the neighborhood, inflicting serious if not fatal injuries.
“In that vicinity water is hard to get, having to be drawn from wells, and owing to the difficulty in securing water, the wonder is that even that much of the group was saved.”
This 1886 report of a neighborhood blaze reveals how fire safety was once a struggle against lack of infrastructure, specifically the absence of municipal water lines in the hills of Seattle. While modern Seattle has robust fire hydrants, the 'long, strong pull' up the hill for emergency crews remains a recurring narrative trope in the city's difficult terrain.
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