ANSWERS: 1
  • Bridge leading into downtown. Tacoma was inhabited for thousands of years by Native American people, predominantly the Puyallup (tribe)Puyallup people, who lived in several settlements on the delta of the Puyallup River and called the area where Tacoma would be built "Squa-szucks." It was visited by European and American explorers, including George Vancouver and Charles Wilkes, who named many of the coastal landmarks. In 1852 a Swede named Nicolas Delin constructed a sawmill powered by water on a creek near the head of Commencement Bay, but the small settlement that grew up around it was abandoned during the Indian War of 1855-1856. In 1864, pioneer and postmaster Job Carr, a Civil War veteran and land speculator who hoped to profit from the selection of Commencement Bay as the terminus of the Transcontinental Railroad, built a cabin (a replica of Job Carr's cabin, which also served as Tacoma's first post office, was erected in "Old Town" in 2000 near the original site), and later sold most of his claim to developer Morton McCarver (1807-1875), who named his project Tacoma City. The name derived from the indigenous name for Mount Rainier, deriving from the Puyallup tacobet, "mother of waters." Tacoma was officially incorporated on November 12, 1875. Its early hopes to be the "City of Destiny" were stimulated by its selection (thanks to lobbying by McCarver and others) in 1873 as the western terminus of the Northern Pacific Railroad. The transcontinental link was effected in 1887, but the railroad built its depot on "New Tacoma," two miles south of the Carr-McCarver development. The two communities subsequently grew together and joined. The population grew from 1,098 in 1880 to 36,006 in 1890. Rudyard Kipling visited Tacoma in 1889 and said Tacoma was "literally staggering under a boom of the boomiest" (quoted in Caroline Denyer Gallacci, The City of Destiny and the South Sound: An Illustrated History of Tacoma and Pierce County Carlsbad, CA: Heritage Media Corp., 2001, p. 49). George Francis Train was a resident of Tacoma for a few years in the late 1800s, and was an early civic booster. In 1880, he staged a global circumnavigation starting and ending in Tacoma to promote the city's centrality. A plaque in downtown Tacoma marks the start and finish point. What came to be known as "Tacoma method" was used in November 1885 to expel several thousand ChinaChinese peaceably living in the city. To quote from the account prepared by the Chinese Reconciliation Project: On the morning of November 3, 1885, "several hundred men, led by the mayor and other city officials, evicted the Chinese from their homes, corralled them at 7th Street and Pacific Avenue, marched them to the railway station at Lakeview and forced them aboard the morning train to Portland, Oregon. The next day two Chinese settlements were burned to the ground." Discovery of the gold in the Klondike in 1898 led Tacoma's prominence in the region to be eclipsed by the booming development of Seattle. During a thirty day power shortage in the winter of 1929/1930, Tacoma was provided with electricity from the engines of the aircraft carrier USS Lexington (CV-2)USS Lexington. In 1935 Tacoma received national attention when George Weyerhaeuser, the nine-year-old son of prominent lumber industry executive J.P. Weyerhaeuser, was kidnapped http://www.fbi.gov/libref/historic/famcases/weyer/weyer.htm while walking home from school. Federal Bureau of InvestigationFBI agents from Portland handled the case, in which payment of a demanded ransom of $200,000 secured the release of the victim. Four persons were later apprehended and convicted in connection with the crime. The last to be released was paroled from McNeil Island in 1963; George Weyerhauser went on to become Chairman of the Board of the Weyerhaeuser Company. In 1951 a state legislative committee revealed widespread corruption in Tacoma's government, which had been organized commission-style since 1910. Voters approved a mayor/city-manager system in 1952. The first local referendums in the U.S. on computerized voting occurred in Tacoma in 1982 and 1987. Each time voters rejected by a 3-1 margin computer voting systems that local officials were on the point of buying. The campaigns, organized by Eleanora Ballasiotes, a conservative Republican, focused on the vulnerabilities of computers to fraud (Ronnie Dugger, "Counting Votes," New Yorker, November 7, 1988). In 1998, the city of Tacoma decided to install a high-speed fiber optic network throughout the community, the municipally owned power company took the initiative to wire an entire city of 187,000 people, thus making Tacoma America's #1 wired city. Tacoma struggled with crime in the 1980s and early 1990s near the Hilltop neighborhood. The problems have declined significantly in recent years as many neighborhoods have enacted community policing and other policies. On April 26, 2003 Tacoma's Chief of Police, David Brame, shot and killed his wife and himself in Gig Harbor, Washington. Tacoma was ranked among the top 30 in America's Most Livable Communities in 2004. The annual Survey is conducted by the Partners for Livable Communities. Tacoma is also notable for having an extensive network of tunnels underneath its streets. Although not open to the public, the passageways have been explored by "urban tunnelers" and discovered to run at least as far as from Stadium High to Tacoma General Hospital. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacoma%2C_Washington

Copyright 2023, Wired Ivy, LLC

Answerbag | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy