Lightning Strikes North Seattle
A severe thunderstorm in July 1885 brought dramatic electrical damage to homes and businesses in North Seattle, setting off fires and injuring a local resident.
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.
Last Thursday morning, instead of dawning warm and clear as has been the case for some weeks past, the day was ushered in dark and cloudy. A light fall of rain occurred in the early morning. About 11 o'clock, a heavy rainstorm arrived, accompanied by thunder and lightning. The atmosphere seemed heavily charged with electricity, and the flashes of lightning came thick and fast. In the residence of Joseph Phillips, in North Seattle, was a set of telegraphic instruments connected by wire to another residence. The lightning followed along this wire, melting it, destroying the instruments, and burning the carpet in Mr. Phillips' house considerably. In Mr. Elder's hardware store, in the same part of town, a large lot of matches were set on fire by the lightning. A telephone pole was struck and slightly damaged. During the fall of the rain, a flash of lightning frightened a team driven by John Legaton. Among the occupants of the carriage was an old lady named Mrs. Carr, who resides on Madison street; the horses ran a short distance, when the carriage was upset, breaking the old lady's collar bone and injuring one of her knees considerably.
“The atmosphere seemed heavily charged with electricity, and the flashes of lightning came thick and fast.”
While summer thunderstorms remain a rarity in the Pacific Northwest, the abrupt weather shift and the vulnerability of the growing city's infrastructure—telegraph lines and early telephone poles—mirror modern concerns regarding grid stability during rare, extreme weather events. The story captures a moment of domestic fragility during Seattle's early expansion into what was then considered 'North Seattle.'
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