Washington

In the 1880s, Seattle became a major coal port in the United States.

By 1908, Puget Sound was the third-largest coal port, after New York and Baltimore. For Seattle, the major coal mines were in Issaquah, New Castle, Renton, and Black Diamond, with many other smaller mines throughout King County. Until the petroleum revolution, Seattle exported most of its coal to San Francisco. Because of coal, Seattle became a center for skilled engineers, machinists, and miners for the maritime, manufacturing, mining, and railroad industries, differentiating itself from other lumber towns on Puget Sound. Seattle’s Coal Legacy is the story of a frontier town going through an industrial revolution in its own time. The skills and knowledge developed during the coal era—engineering, finance, transportation, manufacturing, etc.—made Seattle the major city it is today.

John M. Goodfellow, as well as his parents and grandparents, grew up in Seattle. He received his master of arts at New York University, studying the history of the measurement of length as a social construct. He thinks of himself as a philosopher of technology who uses history as evidence.

In 1833, the British Hudson’s Bay Company established the first Fort Nisqually as a fur trading post in the area now known as DuPont, Washington. When the second Fort Nisqually closed in 1870, its last commander, Edward Huggins, homesteaded the old fort site. In 1906, the DuPont Company, founded in 1802 by E.I. DuPont, purchased land from Huggins and other small farmers and constructed a powder works plant to manufacture explosives. In order to house plant workers and their families, the company created a village, named DuPont. At its height, the company employed approximately 400 people at the plant, with 600 living in the village. In 1951, the town incorporated. Due to a waning need for powdered explosives, the DuPont Company closed the plant in 1976 and sold its property to the Weyerhaeuser Company. A period of rapid growth in business development followed, and DuPont now confidently faces the future as a modern city.

In 1890, D. E. Frederick arrived in Seattle and, joined soon after by Nels Nelson, started what would become one of the Northwest's best-loved and well-regarded stores. For more than 100 years, Frederick & Nelson was much more than just a department store to the people of Seattle--it was an icon. F&N, as locals referred to it, established the city's retail
core, led the war-bond drive, acted as a civic booster, and pioneered a high level of benefits for its workers. But it was the customer experience that made all the difference at F&N. Whether it was a fashion show in the Tea Room, a visit to Santa, or the taste of a Frango, the memories of Frederick & Nelson still resonate today throughout the Pacific Northwest.

The Mayflower Park Hotel started life as the Bergonian Hotel on July 16, 1927. One of Seattle's first uptown hotels, it was designed by architect B. Dudley Stuart and built by Stephen Berg at a cost of $750,000. In the midst of the Great Depression, the hotel was sold and renamed Hotel Mayflower. In 1948, Washington State legalized cocktail lounges, and the Hotel Mayflower became Seattle's first hotel to open one. In the ensuing decades, Seattle prospered, and it hosted the 1962 World's Fair with its symbolic Space Needle. By the 1970s, Seattle was in a deep recession, and the hotel had become sadly neglected. In 1974, Birney and Marie Dempcy formed a limited partnership to purchase the hotel and renamed it the Mayflower Park Hotel. Restoration started immediately, and after 40 years, the Dempcys remain dedicated to the tradition of making the Mayflower Park Hotel "Quite Simply, One of a Kind."