It was 106 years ago this week that a spark from a blacksmith shop torched a pile of hay, causing a fire that burned several Everett buildings — chief among them the Snohomish County Courthouse.
That account of the courthouse fire, which happened Aug. 2, 1909, is well told in a 2006 essay Everett historian Margaret Riddle wrote for the HistoryLink website.
With sources that include Everett Herald archives and Charles Z. Henderson’s 1992 book “The Fire Boys: 100 Years of Everett Firefighting History,” Riddle told how firefighters had too few men and not enough water to knock down the flames before the courthouse was a charred ruin.
Illustrating Riddle’s essay are pictures from the Everett Public Library digital collections. They show the original 1897 courthouse, the massive building ablaze, and the burned-out hulk.
And a photo dated 1910 — just a year after the fire — shows the rebuilt Mission Revival Style courthouse. Finished in 1911, the Mission Building still stands facing Wetmore Avenue on the county campus.
Looked at simply, the quick rebuilding of the courthouse seems to show that Snohomish County government was incredibly efficient in the early 1900s. By 1911, the original architect, August Heide, had designed and overseen construction of a replacement courthouse. It incorporated three surviving arches from the old building in a new style. Tile roofing replaced the wood shingles that first caught fire.
Jump to August 2015, and we’re following the long, complicated saga over plans to build a new eight-story courthouse to replace the part of the complex that was added in the mid-1960s. In Tuesday’s Herald, writer Noah Haglund provided an overview of the proposed $162 million project. Ground was to have been broken this month for the new courthouse, which Snohomish County Superior Court officials say is needed because of serious safety concerns, access and other problems.
Now, the brakes are on due to multiple issues. They include a stalled city of Everett agreement over parking for a new courthouse, and worries over the possible loss of millions of dollars from the county budget.
Wrangling over a new or remodeled courthouse dates back at least seven years, to the troubled administration of County Executive Aaron Reardon. Millions have already been spent on the project. With the most expensive courthouse plan decided upon by 2013, the county used eminent domain to acquire space for it from a half-dozen property owners.
Snohomish County has a messy, costly situation on its hands, with no immediate fix in sight. It makes the quick rebuild after the 1909 fire look like county government at its best.
Not so fast, said David Dilgard, a Northwest history specialist at the Everett Public Library. There is more to that story than our forebears’ effectiveness. As Dilgard described it, local government back then could be chaotic, corrupt, even downright criminal.
Dilgard gives high praise to Heide, who worked for the Everett Land Company. The original courthouse was unreinforced masonry, and built in what Dilgard called “a beautiful French-chateau style.” The architect’s redesign created the much improved Mission Building. “What he did was encase the entire thing in reinforced concrete,” Dilgard said.
Behind the scenes, there were political shenanigans hard to imagine today. Dilgard tells how the Snohomish County Courthouse — and county seat — ended up in Everett, when it was once in Snohomish, and before that, in Mukilteo.
Louis Kossuth Church had come to Everett after serving as territorial governor of the Dakotas. Church was a former New York legislator. “L.K. Church knew about political tomfoolery from up close,” Dilgard said. After Everett’s economic downturn of 1893, he said, “L.K. Church was looking upriver.”
Knowing how Snohomish took the county seat from Mukilteo in 1861, Democrats including Church “plotted and planned,” Dilgard said. A county election in 1894 included the question of which town — Everett or Snohomish — should be county seat. That vote included Everett’s plan to pass a bond issue to pay for a new courthouse.
There were jokes about how Snohomish never spent a penny on roads. An Everett group had a campaign song, “Down the River the Courthouse Glides,” Dilgard said. “The whole election was just foul. The whole thing went into the courts and they duked it out.”
Decades later, in the 1950s, some survivors of the 1894 political fight gave interviews saying the Everett side was “paying people from Ballard a dollar a head to vote,” Dilgard said. There were accusations, too, that some voters “were buried in the cemetery in Snohomish,” he said.
By 1897, Everett had its courthouse. And by 1911, it had been rebuilt — slick and quick.
Gee, maybe we should be thankful that today’s county officials are taking their time. Or maybe looking back a century proves something else.
“We think county government acts strange now. It always has,” Dilgard said.
Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460; jmuhlstein@heraldnet.com.
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