Early Snohomish Washington Bird's Eye View 1890

This town and the country in its vicinity was the first settled in 1859. No families came here before 1864. It was made the county seat of Snohomish County in 1861. The first settlers were all single men. Before 1872 only some three or four families lived here. All the really valuable buildings have been put up since 1870. The first school was taught here in 1869. Since 1872 improvements have gone steadily forward and population has increased, until a year ago over 1,000 people resided in this place and its immediate vicinity.

The building of the Seattle, Lake Shore and Eastern Railroad from Seattle, the metropolis of Puget Sound, to this place last year, started a genuine boom. Property advanced from 200 to 300 per cent in value, and last fall the population was over twice as great as the spring before. During the past winger many newcomers found permanent homes in the surrounding country, and perhaps there was no considerable increase of population in the town from December to April. Now immigrants are coming rapidly, and the town population is steadily increasing.

The population of the town proper is now nearly 2,000. In Snohomish Precinct, which includes the town and the region of country in its immediate vicinity, there is now a population of nearly or quite 3,000 people. For its size and age this is the best built town in Washington. Should the great immigration expected the coming fall really reach us, it would not be surprising to find 3,000 people in the town, 5,000 people in Snohomish Precinct, an 10,000 people in Snohomish County, before January 1st, 1890. Now, what has built up the town? What is there here to maintain a large population? What are the interests and resources of the place? Besides being the county seat of a prosperous, growing county, it is the center of immense timber interests and extra and productive farming lands.

Each are mainly found on different classes of land. Yet more valuable lumber interest center at this place than at any other point in Washington ; while the town is the center of more extra fertile bottom land than any other town on Puget Sound. For many years the logging interests took the lead, the cost of clearing and improving the farming lands having make such improvements to go slow at first. Now that stage is past, and farming is a leading interest, and farm improvements are being rapidly made. Each year, for nearly twenty years past, many valuable buildings, for both residence and business purposes, have been erected ; but last year and this a veritable building boom has been going on. During the past fifteen months one hundred residences and business houses have been built.

Since January 1st some forty residences and nearly a dozen business buildings for stores and manufactories have been put up, some of them very valuable buildings. Should present plans be carried out, there will be over $200,000 worth of improvements made during the current year. The manufacturing interests have also made good progress. During 1889, the total value of all local manufactured products, as lumber, shingles, sash, doors and blinds, furniture, wood and iron work, will amount to about $400,000 in value. About two hundred men find employment here, at present, in the mills and shops, and as carpenters, masons, painters, and skilled mechanics generally. Many more are actively engaged as teamsters, in teaming, freighting, etc. About 500 men work in the woods as lumbermen, in regions tributary to this town, most of whom claim Snohomish as their home. Others are employed in clearing land, grading, and in making other improvements in this vicinity.

There is also a constant demand for farm laborers, at good wages. This great amount of labor, continuously expended from year to year, cannot fail to produce a great effect in opening up and improving the county. Snohomish is located on the north bank of the Snohomish river, fifteen miles from its mouth. It is twenty-five miles, in an air-line, northeast from Seattle ; by steamboat the distance is fifty miles, and over the Seattle, Lake Shore and Eastern Railroad the distance is thirty-five miles. It is expected the main line of this road, going east over the Cascade mountains, will start from this place, making the junction here with the branch now built seven miles northward from this town, and which may this season be extended into British Columbia, connecting there with the Canadian Pacific Railway. For fear a junction might not be made here this season, a local company has been organized, which has a corps of competent engineers now in the field, locating a railroad from here to the summit of the Cascade mountains. It is supposed that sufficient local backing can be secured to build this new road thus farm whatever the Seattle, Lake Shore and Eastern may do.

This guarantees direct communication from here eastward, by railroad, at no distant day. The distance from here to the summit will probably be about seventy-five miles, through a productive region, containing the great agricultural, lumbering and mining interests, all tributary to Snohomish. This place is also the head of tide-water navigation on Snohomish river. An active steamboat trade is down this river, to Puget Sound, and up this river on smaller steamers, some fifty miles or more, on the Snohomish and Snoqualmie rivers, nearly to Snoqualmie falls.

These falls are 280 feet high, 113 feet higher than Niagara, and present a beautiful and sublime object, perhaps the finest in Washington, and excelled by few of Nature's works anywhere in America. Puget Sound steamers of 400 tons burden can readily come to Snohomish, up Snohomish river, on the tide from the Sound. Fifty thousand dollars properly expended on this river would secure a depth of sixteen feet at high tide, so that ocean steamers of one thousand tons could be made to come and go from this place, opening to the business interests of this place a worldwide commerce, without the necessity of reshipment, as at present. This improvement will be made at no distant day.

source: Bird's Eye View Map