The Seattle Times: Pacific Northwest Magazine


Cover Story	Plant Life	On Fitness	Taste	Northwest Living	Now & Then

WRITTEN BY PAUL DORPAT

Posted for Service

That these "now and then" views were photographed from nearly the same spot may be figured from how the lamp posts that run across the center of the scene line up with the Fourth Avenue façade of the New Richmond Hotel. Both look north toward an elevated Jackson Street from the King Street Station parking lot. The seven-story Armour Co. building that dominates the historical view was razed in 1928 for the Second Avenue Extension to the train depots.

THE YEAR printed on the license plates for the seven postal vans posing here with their drivers near the lower entrance to the King Street Station is 1921. That year the Seattle Postal Service operated 66 stations scattered from Greenwood to the Rainier Valley. At the top of the list was the main post office, the classic pile of Chuckanut sandstone at Third and Union where most of the expediting work — including sorting the mail — was then still handled.

Second in importance was the Terminal Station here at 218 King St., where Daniel Ragan, assistant superintendent of mails, opened the windows at 8 a.m. By the time the King Street Station was completed in 1906, railroads were long since the spine of the national postal system. In 1853, when Arthur Denny was appointed the first Seattle postmaster, canoes and horses did the heavy lifting.

A year earlier, locals joined to hire Robert Moxlie to make weekly canoe trips to Olympia to deliver letters and pick them up. But in the fall of 1853 the little steamer Fairy took on this job. In 1876, steamer service — including mail pouches — became a daily event between Seattle and Tacoma. And there was daily service to Renton by rail and to Port Blakely by steamer as well.

Free mail delivery was established in 1887 with four carriers, and thereafter carrier statistics were another barometer of this boom town. By 1900, 32 carriers operated out of the main post office. By 1921, 260 carriers and 354 clerks were on the payroll and Eddie Hubbard was regularly flying mail to Victoria, B.C., for the postal service.

Hubbard's plane, the B-1, hangs from the ceiling at the Museum of History & Industry.

Paul Dorpat's two-hour videotape on Seattle's early history, "Seattle Chronicle," is $29.95 from Tartu Publications, P.O. Box 85208, Seattle, WA 98145.


Cover Story	Plant Life	On Fitness	Taste	Northwest Living	Now & Then