The Forgotten Tragedy at the Seattle Waterfront
Decades before Seattle became a bustling metropolis, the wife of a Missouri governor suffered a fatal fall at the city's docks—a tragedy that haunted the local courts.
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.
Governor Phelps was brought into contact with the people of Puget Sound, nothing less than ten years ago, by an accident which happened to his wife while here, in which she sustained injuries which eventually caused her death. Mrs. Phelps had come from San Francisco to the Sound, on the Pacific Mail steamship City of Panama, and directly after the arrival of the mail, she fell through a hatchway, which had been carelessly left open and unguarded. One of her legs was broken by the fall and she received other serious injuries. Governor Phelps brought a suit for damages against the Pacific Mail Company and secured a heavy judgment against them.
“Mrs. Phelps had come from San Francisco to the Sound... and directly after the arrival of the mail, she fell through a hatchway, which had been carelessly left open and unguarded.”
Long before Seattle became a global maritime hub, its docks were notoriously dangerous, unregulated spaces. This 19th-century legal battle over an open, unguarded hatchway foreshadows the ongoing civic struggles to hold massive corporations accountable for worker and passenger safety in our rapidly expanding city.
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