Diablo Dam incline railway climbing Sourdough Mountain, 1930. Courtesy Seattle Municipal Archives, 2306.
Children waving to ferry, 1950. Courtesy Museum of History and Industry.
Loggers in the Northwest woods. Courtesy Washington State Digital Archives.
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Please consider helping us build the Fund by donating today.
Baseball season is here again, and this week we offer a look back at the history of professional baseball in Washington. In 1872, Seattle had an amateur team called the Dolly Varden (Go Fish!), but professional ball didn’t arrive in Washington until 1890, when franchises were awarded to Seattle, Tacoma, and Spokane. Soon after, Daniel Dugdale arrived in the Northwest and managed many teams, including the legendary 1912 Seattle Giants, which later became the Indians.
During the Great Depression, the Seattle Indians fell on hard times. Labor leader and baseball fanatic Dave Beck was offered ownership of the team for free, but had no interest in becoming a baseball mogul. Instead he consulted his friend Emil Sick, who had made a small fortune brewing beer after the end of Prohibition four years earlier. Sick bought the team in 1937, renamed it the Seattle Rainiers, and built a brand-new stadium in Rainier Valley.
By the 1960s attendance had dropped off due to television coverage of Major League Baseball. That all changed in 1969, when the Seattle Pilots came to town as Seattle's first major-league franchise. But the team bailed after only one season, mostly because Sicks' Stadium wasn't ready for the big leagues. Sports fans rallied for a new stadium, the Kingdome, which opened in 1976.
The new stadium was not without its detractors and naysayers, but 57,000 fans showed up on April 6, 1977 to watch the newly enfranchised Seattle Mariners play – and lose – their first game. The stadium hosted an All-Star Game in 1979, but it wasn't until 1991 that the Mariners had a winning season, and the team didn’t win its first playoff series until 1995 – the same year that voters rejected funding for a better stadium
The Mariners won their division again in 1997, by which time the state legislature had stepped in and approved taxes for a new home field. The Kingdome was imploded in 2000, after Safeco Field (now T-Mobile Park) rose nearby to take its place. Since then we've experienced some heartfelt moments from Hall of Famers – both on and off the field – as well as some exciting and historic events that have entered into the record books. The championship, alas, remains elusive, but as many Mariners fans will tell you, this just might be the year.
News Then,History Now
Doubleheader
April 1 marks two important anniversaries in the early history of Tacoma. The first occurred on April 1, 1852, when Nicolas Delin began constructing a sawmill at the head of Commencement Bay. And on April 1, 1868, developer Morton Matthew McCarver arrived to purchase land for a new townsite, which he called Tacoma City. Within five years he had helped convince the Northern Pacific Railroad to choose Commencement Bay as its western terminus.
Earned Run
On March 31, 1889, Seattle's first electric streetcar took to the streets and was an immediate success. The people of Seattle officially took over operation of the city's streetcar lines on April 1, 1919, but the date of the deed should have given somebody pause. It soon turned out that Seattle Mayor Ole Hanson had paid a grossly inflated price of $15 million and accepted disastrous terms to acquire the private system from the giant utility cartel Stone & Webster, which had gobbled up all local streetcar lines by 1900.
Change Up
On April 1, 1946, shipbuilding industrialist Henry J. Kaiser began aluminum production operations in Mead, just north of his former hometown of Spokane. Kaiser had no experience in the metals industry and many of his peers thought the business would be a failure. Kaiser Aluminum went on to become the country’s third-largest producer of the versatile metal.
Ground Out
On March 29, 1968, the Court C Coffeehouse opened in Tacoma as a gathering place for artists and intellectuals. And speaking of coffee, on March 30, 1971, Jerry Baldwin, Gordon Bowker, and Zev Siegl handed out free sample cups of coffee to their first customers in their new coffee shop near Pike Place Market. They only sold beans for the next decade, but once they began to sell brewed coffee, Starbucks burst onto the world stage.