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Pierce County Lore

This week HistoryLink features four new essays related to Pierce County, thanks to a grant from the Pierce County Landmarks and Historic Preservation Commission. We begin with the history of Fairfax, which produced coke and coal from 1899 through the 1920s (shown above). Located six miles south of Carbonado, the town was also a community hub for those who lived in the adjacent coal-mining towns of Melmont and Montezuma, but it's now a ghost town.

We also have a new essay about a sensational attempted-murder case in Melmont, where a miner named George Steele was accused of trying to blow up his boss with dynamite. Town residents claimed that he was angry that the foreman had been promoted ahead of him and tried to kill him as an act of vengeance. The jury determined that there was no direct evidence connecting Steele to the crime, and whoever dynamited the foreman's house remains a mystery. 

Finally, we present two new biographical essays. The first is about Colonel Wilbur Peterkin, a high school teacher from Sumner who became an original member – and briefly commander – of the Dixie Mission, a mostly forgotten initiative to train troops and gather intelligence about Chinese capacity to help defeat Japan in World War II. After leaving the Army in 1946, Peterkin returned to teaching at Sumner and later at Franklin Pierce High School.

Another Pierce County educator of note is Clara McCarty, who was also from Sumner. Not only was she the first graduate of the Territorial University (later the University of Washington), but also the first Pierce County woman to hold elective office and the first person in Pierce County to own a typewriter. In 1880 she was elected superintendent of Pierce County schools, and while in office visited every school in the county, traveling by horse and buggy, and even steamboat.

 Messaging of Yore

On October 25, 1864, telegraph lines finally reached Seattle, greatly increasing the speed with which Northwesterners received or sent out news and information. More than a month earlier, the telegraph line south of the Columbia River reached Olympia, where the first official telegram from Washington Territory was sent to Abraham Lincoln, letting him know that the two Washingtons were now in communication with one another.

Four years earlier, when Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 election, it took 16 days for the news to travel west, first by telegraph to California, then north by horseback and steamer. Even at that, an Olympia newspaper marveled at the speed with which it obtained those election results, writing "The annihilation ... [of] time and distance seems incomprehensible."

With telegraph lines in place, news came much faster. When the Civil War ended on April 9, 1865, it took two days for the news to reach Puget Sound. When Lincoln was assassinated a few days later, Washingtonians knew about it within hours. By the end of the decade, most of the country was wired by Western Union, and people marveled at how easy it was to communicate from coast to coast.

Then, in 1878, Seattle got a view of the future when Western Union demonstrated the city's first telephone. By 1883, the city had its first telephone exchange – with 90 subscribers – and a decade later, long-distance telephone service connected Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, and Spokane. By the turn of the century, telephones were supplanting telegraphs as the primary means of cross-country communication.