Page 31 - 2024 March April Magazine

The Seattle, WA Harbor 1800's
is now Thea Foss Waterway. The logging of old-growth fir continued northward along the easily accessible waterfront of Commencement Bay.
In 1864, Job Carr dreamed of capitalizing on the westward extension of the Northern Pacific Railroad. Whether on a hunch or questionable tips, Carr and son purchased several lots near the bottom of what is now Carr and 31st Street and the south shore of Commencement Bay, and waited for the windfall. This neighborhood originally was known as ‘Tacoma City’.
Stadium
to Point Defiance Park; our first tourist attraction. A replica Carr cabin was constructed in the 1980s near its original neighborhood at the base on 30th Street.
Methodist Bishop John Adams Paddock and his wife, Fannie, arrived in Old Town and in 1873 constructed St. Peter’s Church. Tacoma’s oldest church, St. Peter’s, survives to this day, as does the 1890s Murphy Building on Starr and North 30th. These Old Town icons give some idea of what the neighborhood looked like 150 years ago.
Shipbuilding, lumber and flour mills flourished in Old Town, and benefited from easy access to wharves and rails which passed by, but did not terminate at Starr Street. Tacoma was known as the lumber capitol of the world in the early 1900s.
‘Two Tacomas’ might not cover the entirety of the situation. All of what is now Tacoma was once Puyallup Indian land, and treaties were created and re-negotiated throughout the 19th Century. Downtown Tacoma, the Puyallup River Delta and Northeast Tacoma were and remain within the reservation boundaries of the Puyallup Tribe. By the time Tacoma was
a gleam in Job Carr’s eye, Steilacoom was a bustling and functional city several miles south, with a courthouse built in 1894. Steilacoom served as Pierce County’s seat of government until Tacoma swiped the title in 1880.
Browns Point and Northeast Tacoma neighborhoods are attached to the city by a narrow ribbon of industrial tideflats created by the levied Puyallup River Delta. These feel more
like suburbs of Federal Way, but the county lines are drawn at such an angle as to place us in Pierce County, rather than south King County.
NOT ALL ARE CONSUMED
Along the west side of Tacoma, University Place was created along Grandview Avenue by the University of Puget Sound in the 1880s with the intent to build a college campus. UP never did become a college community, but was considered part of unincorporated Pierce County and a suburb of Tacoma until enacting its own city charter in 1995.
Continued on next page.
Author contemplating train ride from Union Station
‘Old Tacoma’ and was politically subsumed into the greater ‘City of Tacoma’ by 1887. The huge Moon Rail Yards along Dock Street and the historic Union Station denote the eventual terminus of Union Pacific. As a 9-year-old, before Union Station abandoned rail service,
The Coach Starlight Passenger Train at the Tacoma Depot Amtrak
In 1873, Union Pacific finally opted instead to terminate south about two miles in what
is now downtown Tacoma, nearer to where Delin’s Mill
had operated. The railroad’s headquarters still stands at 621 Pacific Ave, across from the Italianate brick Old City Hall. ‘Tacoma City’ became
I was able to catch a passenger train at Union Station and ride eastward through forests, tunnels and snow across the Cascades to Cashmere. I remember our train having to stop for snowdrifts, and free samples of Cashmere Cotlets.
Having fallen into disrepair, Union Station was refurbished in a Norm Dicks-sponsored revamp of downtown in the 1980s, and now serves as a Federal Courthouse and attached Historical Museum.
We might imagine Job Carr’s disappointment at betting on the wrong horse. He did get his historic cabin moved in its entirety
March/April 2024 | PIERCE COUNTY LAWYER 31