The Lumber City: Tacoma's First Industry
Near Tacoma, Washington
Before the railroad made Tacoma the City of Destiny, before the copper smelter, before the paper mills, there was timber. The forests of the Cascade foothills and the Olympic Peninsula were among the densest stands of commercially valuable wood in the world, Douglas fir, Sitka spruce, western red cedar, and hemlock growing in dimensions that loggers from the cutover forests of the Great Lakes and New England found almost incomprehensible when they arrived in the Pacific Northwest in the second half of the nineteenth century. Nicolas Delin was the first to build a mill at what would become Tacoma, in eighteen fifty-two, a water-powered sawmill on a creek above Commencement Bay.
The Puget Sound lumber trade had been established even earlier, serving the California market that the Gold Rush of eighteen forty-nine had created almost overnight. San Francisco needed lumber to build itself. Puget Sound was close, the trees were vast, and the deep-water harbors could accommodate oceangoing ships that loaded directly from the mills.
When the Northern Pacific chose Tacoma as its western terminus in eighteen seventy-three and its rails finally tied the city to the East in the eighteen eighties, the lumber trade shifted into a different register. Now Tacoma's mills could ship timber east as well as south. The tideflats south of downtown became a dense patchwork of sawmills, shingle mills, planing mills, and the associated industries that processed what came out of the forest.
Tacoma became a major lumber-shipping port. The timber industry employed thousands of workers in the mills and in the logging camps in the surrounding hills and mountains. It was dangerous work, millwork generated tremendous volumes of sawdust and involved moving machinery with no guarding, and it shaped the working-class character of the city that grew around it.
The forests themselves were not infinite, and the industry's geography shifted steadily north and east as accessible timber was cut. What remained, on the tideflats where the mills had stood, was the industrial infrastructure that later industries moved into and the contaminated land that environmental regulators would spend decades trying to address.
