Old Town: Where Tacoma Began

The neighborhood called Old Town sits on a gentle slope above a small protected cove at the northern edge of the Commencement Bay waterfront, and it is where the city began. Not where it grew, or where it industrialized, or where it built its grandest architecture, where it began. Job Carr arrived here on Christmas Day of eighteen sixty-four, Civil War veteran, land claimant, and soon-to-be postmaster of a settlement that did not yet exist in any official sense.

Carr built a cabin on his claim of a hundred and sixty-eight acres. The cabin doubled as the local post office when Carr was appointed postmaster, serving the handful of settlers who had begun arriving in the region. The cove below the bluff provided shelter for small boats.

The land above was covered in the massive Douglas firs and western red cedars that characterized this coast before the sawmills arrived. Nicolas Delin, a Swedish immigrant, had already established a water-powered sawmill nearby in eighteen fifty-two, on a creek that fed into the bay. Delin's mill was among the first industrial operations on the southern sound, serving the same timber trade that would, within a generation, consume most of the old-growth forests of the Olympic and Cascade foothills.

Old Town was the seed from which that transformation grew. After the railroad terminus moved the center of commercial gravity south to what became downtown Tacoma in the eighteen-eighties, Old Town was left largely behind. It became a residential neighborhood rather than a commercial hub, which preserved its older architectural character better than the downtown districts where development pressure was higher.

Today the neighborhood has a replica of Job Carr's cabin, built in two thousand near the original site, now operating as a small museum. The streets still run on the original survey grid that Carr and the early settlers laid out. The cove is still there, smaller now against the industrial background of the port, but still recognizably the place where a Civil War veteran pulled a boat up on a winter afternoon and decided this would do.