The Senior Scene

“There is, perhaps, no seaport town of its size in the United States where so large a portion of the inhabitants are so deeply interested in ships.”
~Captain Cameron of the J.B. Brown speaking of New Tacoma

Captain Cameron made this statement one day in May 1883 after watching Tacoma residents as they walked along the wharves one Sunday afternoon looking at the ships and talking to the sailors.

“I’m an old-timer in these parts,” the captain told a Tacoma Daily Ledger reporter.  “I came here as a mate on the ship Dashing Wave in 1874 and followed a trail through the woods to New Tacoma.  There were just three shanties up on the bluff then.  And I well-remember the first ship that came to New Tacoma.  It was 1877 and she had a cargo of railroad iron for the Northern Pacific.  It was the American ship, Ventus.  I think she took away a cargo of lumber from the Tacoma Mill.”

There is no information about the Ventus, but the Dashing Wave was one of the last true American clippers.  She was built in 1852 in New Hampshire and reached San Francisco in only 107 days. After being sunk in New York harbor, she was bought for the lumber trade and brought to Puget Sound.  Once here, she made thirteen round trips between the Tacoma and San Francisco in a single year, establishing a record.  In 1900, the clipper was sold, and used in the Nome trade after which she made a voyage to Hawaii.  In 1902 the Pacific Cold Storage Co bought her, and in 1911 the ship and the cannery were sold to John Carlson of Seattle.  The clipper remained in service for nine more years and ended up as a cold storage barge.

Under ordinary circumstances, a scow is a large flat-bottomed boat with broad square ends, used chiefly for transporting bulk material such as ore, sand, or refuse.  In 1877 Tacoma, milkman R. A. Scott used his to sell his dairy products up and down the bay.  Then he enlarged it in order to haul hay, but not before he christened it with a seaboard dance.

According to the Tacoma Herald, the first Chinese junk seen on the bay was on July 25, 1878.  “It was built on the Sound, about ten miles above here,” the paper reported, “and is to be used in the fishing business by some Chinese who have been upon the Sound for some time, catching and drying various kinds of fish for the San Francisco market.”  The paper went on to say the junk was a “picturesque affair with all the peculiar attachments that distinguish the Celestial craft.  It looks as though it had backed into a lot of chicken coops and three or four pairs of stairs, and had gone off with them all sticking to it.”  The reporter did concede that the sailors aboard “managed it with great dexterity, and are as regular in their movements as man-of-war’s men.”
These days it is hard to know what the Herald was referring to when it said that “Mike Murphy and a friend, while sailing their small plunger near Pt. Defiance, capsized.”  A plunger is a submarine and, although submarines date back to before the Civil War, it’s not likely there was one in Commencement Bay.  But at least both men survived.  Mike held on to an oar and climbed up on the ship’s bow.  He was able to row toward shore while his companion held onto the keel.  Men in a passing boat rescued them.

Though often seen in Commencement Bay, the Alida was never a success.  She was laid up in Olympia in 1871 and after a year’s work, came out again in 1872 making the run between Olympia and Seattle.  In 1873 she took the first passengers from Old Tacoma to the new town to connect with the first railroad train to run in Puget Sound. She was out of commission again the greater portion of the time after 1879.  Then in August 1890, while laid up at Gig Harbor, she was caught in a fire, which swept down from the forest, and burned to the water’s edge. Her damaged engines were saved and taken to Lake’s shipyard, in Ballard.
The bark, Samoset, was built in New Hampshire in 1847 and turned up in Tacoma on Nov. 10, 1869.  Less than a month later, she set sail from the Hanson and Ackerman Mill for San Francisco with 487,350 feet of lumber, the mill’s first lumber shipment.

The first cargo of wheat to go to a foreign port from Puget Sound was shipped from Tacoma, Nov. 5, 1881, on the S.S. Dakota,a cargo vessel.
On Oct. 27, 1895,1,869 bales of silk, 95 cases of silk goods, and 125 bales of waste silk the largest cargo of silk ever shipped to Tacoma arrived on the steamship Victoria.

And boats weren’t all that floated in Commencement Bay.  In March 1878, an unidentified man built a cabin on a raft and moored it near the wharf.  One night an elderly Puyallup man walked off the edge of the wharf and was rescued by two men rowing down from Old Town.  What they were all doing out at 2 a.m. was never said, but the rescued man was taken to the precursor of a houseboat to recover.

From scow to schooner, from ferry to freighter, bark to bateau, they were all here, lending beauty now greatly missed.

Remember when, for a period of time, some Tacoma houses had tarpaper roofs with shiny bits of mica on top?  Those roofs were probably made at Jesse Berkheimer’s plant on South M Street.
Berkheimer, born in Delhi, Indiana, moved to Minneapolis as a young man and worked in the roofing business.  He wanted to go to Alaska when gold was discovered, but only got as far as Seattle where he worked for a sheet metal and tar roofing company.

Six years later, he started his own contracting and excavating business, and a small tar roofing plant near Lake Washington.

In 1908, he relocated the business to a site on Tacoma’s tideflats, contracted with the Tacoma Gas Company to buy all their coal tar byproduct, and used it to make tarpaper and felt roofing.

Locals scoffed.  Roofs were wooden shingles and there was plenty of wood and plenty of mills to make shingles.  Nevertheless, Berkheimer persevered.  When the company he had worked for in the mid-west bought the Seattle plant and offered Berkheimer $10,000 and a job to buy him out, Berkheimer turned them down.

During World War I, the city decided to use Berkheimer’s property for a car barn.  Forced to move, he bought land at 29th and M Street and built a plant.

To make roofing felt, Berkheimer, ground old rags in a machine that chewed them up into a fluffy fiber.  The fiber was dumped into a vat of water and the mucky pulp was fed through a machine that beat it.  From there, it went to a machine where the fiber was mixed with a little more water and forced onto a revolving cylinder three feet in diameter. It came off the cylinder as a thin felt mat, which dried on rollers.  Once dry it was felt paper.

The felt then went into the asphalt room, was unwound and passed through a tank of hot asphalt, which was forced in by heavy rollers.

For cheaper grades of tarpaper, the process stopped here.  For better grades, more asphalt was applied and the felt went to another roller where a thick coating of green, red, blue or gray pulverized mica or slate was rolled onto it. A machine dusted it with talcum powder and another cut the asphalt roofing into shingle-sized squares.

Berkheimer used Vermont slate, mica from New York, talcum from Washington, asphalt from California, and tar, which was a byproduct from gas plants.  The tar came in tank cars and had to be run through a distilling boiler.  At a temperature of 700˚ the creosote it contained was condensed and Berkheimer was able to sell this on the open market. All this was, of course, made possible by Tacoma’s amazing railroad service.
On July 26, 1926, an explosion in the boiler room nearly demolished the plant.  Barrels and vats of benzoyl, naphtha gas and other flammable chemicals made for intense heat and fast-spreading flames.

There were no nearby hydrants.  Firefighters laid hoses for blocks in order to get water.  Six engine companies responded, and lookey-loos, who were willing to risk injury or worse just to get close, were regularly drenched with water.

The exploding benzoyl sent up 50-ft columns of fire.  Next door, the Ford Prairie Fuel Company had large piles of wood.  As the firefighters blasted water at the wood, large chucks flew into the air.  One came down on the head of firefighter Raymond Hammond who had to be hospitalized.  Joe Allen, the plant’s roofing superintendent, broke a window into the office and rescued all the records.  The plant was a total loss.

A year later, Berkheimer had rebuilt, was back in business, and had expanded to include a paper making plant and a place that handled his own by-products.

Making building paper, now called tarpaper, was a similar process.  Old newspapers were ground and the pulp went through the same steps except that the final one was to coat the paper with tar rather than asphalt.

In 1927, there was another fire.  This time some asphalt exploded.  Employees managed to shut off the pipes through which the asphalt was flowing, three firefighting companies responded and were able to beat back and contain the flames and the damage.

There was another fire in 1932.  Seven fire departments responded; the fire chief called in every available piece of equipment leaving three companies to handle the rest of the city, and for a time all the Center Street business district was threatened.

If it hadn’t been for a west blowing wind, tanks of oil and gasoline at the nearby Shell Oil Company distributing plant would have exploded.  This fire started when employee John Adler turned on a valve and hot asphalt flowing into a kettle exploded.  He was badly injured, and the saturating mill, refining mill, boiler rooms and storerooms were destroyed.  Berkheimer had $4,000 in insurance and the damages were $70,000.

Berkheimer installed an asphalt refinery in 1935.  A year later, Louis Goldsmith, an airmail pilot flying from Seattle to Portland via Tacoma, noticed flames from yet another fire.  He notified the Tacoma Airport radio operator who called the fire department.  Berkheimer’s insurance was sufficient to cover the $25,000 in damages.  Rebuilding took a week.

In 1939 Berkheimer added an addition, which included new lofts and storage space, and a new suite of offices.  Four years later, a fire started from spontaneous combustion in the rag room.  People raced to the site.  One car knocked down a policeman, explosions rocked several spectators.  The plant was destroyed.  Berkheimer said he did have some insurance.

Once again, Berkheimer rebuilt.  The plant caught fire in 1944; three months later he sold the business to Joe Allen who had saved all the records in the1926 fire and retired to enjoy a well-earned rest.