Everett: Massacre, Lumber, and the Largest Building on Earth

Everett was always a place where big money and dangerous work collided. The city grew up in the eighteen nineties around timber, and the mills were brutal. Of the two hundred twenty-four people who died in Everett in nineteen oh nine alone, thirty-five were killed in the mills. Nearly one worker a week.

The most violent day in the city's history came on November fifth, nineteen sixteen, when a steamship called the Verona pulled into the city dock carrying members of the Industrial Workers of the World, the radical union known as the Wobblies, who had come to support striking shingle weavers. They were met by a mob of deputized mill owners and their hired men. Shots were fired from both directions. At least five Wobblies and two deputies died; the full death toll was likely higher, with bodies dropping into the water. The event became known as the Everett Massacre, and it radicalized the labor movement across the Pacific Northwest for a generation.

The city took a different trajectory after World War Two. Frederick Weyerhaeuser had already built his timber empire here, using Everett as the hub of his Pacific Northwest operations. But it was Boeing that remade everything. In nineteen sixty-seven, Boeing broke ground on a factory north of Seattle large enough to assemble the brand-new seven forty-seven. When the building was completed in nineteen sixty-eight, it enclosed about four hundred seventy two million cubic feet of space, making it the largest building by volume on earth. That distinction still holds. The factory has since expanded to handle the seven sixty-seven, seven seventy-seven, and seven eighty-seven Dreamliner programs.

Stand outside it and the scale does not quite register. The roof is four stories up and covers ninety-eight acres. On foggy mornings, employees report seeing clouds form inside the building before the air handling systems clear them. Everett grew up in the shadow of enormous machines, and that has never really changed.