Overview

In 1888, the Northern Pacific Railway Company's Columbia and Puget Sound Railroad Company subsidiary maintained a raill yard complex consisting of about twelve main structures. It stood off of Weller Street, between 2nd and 3rd Avenues. To the south, the Oregon Improvement Company operated a lumber yard and wharf, an enterprise also owned by the Northern Pacific. The Oregon Improvement Company was part of the Northern Pacific's vertical monopoly. It controlled ferry and railroad services that determined the shipping of coal and lumber as well as the supplies timber and coal itself.

Building History

Before 1889, this rail yard had two locomotive houses, two turntables, a machine shop and attached sheet metal shop, two large storehouses, a car shop, a water tank, coal box, and two storehouses for sand and lamps. Officials of the Columbia and Puget Sound Railroad built this complex into the tidelands south of Pioneer Square raised on wooden piers and covered with planking. This location on Weller Street was the first site of standard-gauge railroad development in the city. (Previous railroad lines were narrow-gauge systems.) The Great Seattle Fire of 06/06/1889 destroyed this complex.

Before this, on 05/01/1874, the Seattle and Walla Walla Railroad (S & WW RR) began building a five-mile line that connected Steele's Landing on the Duwamish River to Renton, WA. Later, Shipping magnate James M. Colman (1832-1906) led this S & WW RR effort that shortened this route an additional 21-miles to connect Steele's Landing to the main coalfields of Newcastle, WA. Colman hired Chinese-born labor teams, who consented to work for lower wages than other groups. Thier willingness to endure hardship in exchange for low wages affronted Seattle's Euro-American workers, who later would create a mob on 02/07/1886 that sought the expulsion of all Chinese-born residents from Seattle. This effort in Seattle came after similar anti-Chinese riots occurred in Eureka, CA, and Tacoma, WA happened in 1885. (See Lynwood Carranco, "Chinese Expulsion from Humboldt County," Pacific Historical Review, vol. 30, no. 4, 11/1961, pp. 329-340.)

Even earlier than the S & WW RR, another narrow-gauge railroad, the Seattle Coal and Transportation Company (S C & T), built a short line that hauled coal from a Lake Union pier to bunkers on Elliott Bay, commencing operations on 03/22/1872. This S C and T line preceded the Seattle and Walla Walla line by a year or two in the early 1870s.

PCAD id: 24635