Every town wishing to become a city requires a Great Fire Story in its early history and the one of 1911 is ours. Fortunately, it was documented by photographer William Douglas who was asleep in a downtown hotel room when the fire alarm sounded in the predawn hours. Backed up by his striking black-and-white photographs, it’s fun to tell the story about the fire which I have often: first here, then here. But the most rewarding telling was without the images when I led a group of Emerson third graders on a walking tour of our historic downtown and received the illustrated thank-you note pictured above.
Please enjoy this two-minute montage of Douglas’s photographs and the story as reported in the Snohomish County Tribune on June 2, 1911.
“Disastrous Fire”
This story is included in our book about J.S. White but as a sidebar, of which four use the newspaper accounts verbatim, and two are about fires!