[Gutenberg 64395] • Tacoma · Electric City of the Pacific Coast, 1904

Excerpt from Tacoma, 1904: Electric City of the Pacific Coast

Tacoma dates its birth from July 14, 1873. On that day the commissioners appointed to locate the Puget Sound terminal of the Northern Pacific railway decided to recommend as such a point on the south side Of Com mencement Bav, in township twenty-one, range three east of the Willamette meridian. Commencement Bay was the largest and best sheltered harbor to be found on Puget Sound and was accessible bv easy grades for rail ways from the north, south and east, and by several easy passes over the great Cascade Mountain range. Into the bay flows the Puyallup River, fed by the eternal glaciers of Mount Tacoma, the giant dome of snow whose image Theodore Winthrop found displaced in the blue depths of tranquil waters in the bay. The shore line of the bay, stretching ten miles from Brown's Point at the northeast to Point Defiance at the northwest was at the time referred to unbroken by human habitations, save a hamlet clustering about a saw mill on the west shore of the bay, a view of which, from a photograph taken in 1871. Is presented on the opposite page. In 1870 the federal census enumerator had found seventy-three in habitants at tacoma.

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