In 1882, Charles B. Wright, who throughout most of the 1880s controlled the Northern Pacific Railroad and the Tacoma Land Company, ordered construction of an “exceptional” hotel in Tacoma. He wanted it to demonstrate to guests that they had reached an important destination. The Northern Pacific Railroad’s line from St. Paul to the Columbia River
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Long before it was Lemon Beach, this strip of land in University Place was just a piece of property settled in the 1870s by Baptist missionary Father Rudolph Weston and his wife, who had married in 1851 and crossed the plains from Connecticut in 1852. Their quarter-section claim along the Narrows included most of the
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Mr. and Mrs. Peter Judson, their sons Peter and John and niece Gertrude Meller left Galena, Illinois in April 1853, by wagon train and joined the Longmire party. After an indescribably difficult trip over the Cascades and Naches Pass, they all rested along Clover Creek. The Judsons eventually continued on to the prairie land south
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In the late 1870s and early 1880s, the “Tacoma Herald” was a short-lived, weekly newspaper with a section dedicated to what the residents were doing. Inside the paper, on the left side of page 4 was a column called “Local Intelligence,”