Irish pioneer Isaac Cathcart found wealth in his new home
Published 10:57 pm Sunday, March 16, 2008
On this St. Patrick’s Day, you may want to raise a glass to one of Snohomish’s founding fathers. Isaac Cathcart,
Cathcart left County Fermanagh, Ireland, for New York as a teenager in 1864 with $11, a rugged constitution and a determination to succeed.
After working in lumber towns in Ontario, Canada, and Michigan for 3 1/2 years, he ventured to the sparsely populated Pacific Northwest.
James Hill’s Great Northern Railway system wouldn’t reach the Pacific Coast for another two decades. Cathcart’s journey to Washington included boat travel along the Missouri and Columbia rivers and a storied 640-mile walk across the Cascades from Fort Benton, Mont., to Wallula Junction, Wash.
By the time he was in his early 40s, the colorful pioneer had amassed great fortune in lumber and real estate in Snohomish County. He owned one of the largest sawmills in the county, as well as the Cathcart Opera House and the Exchange Hotel in Snohomish. His holdings also included 6,000 acres of prime timber and farmland.
“What he has came gradually through those years as the result of correct business calculations and not by chance or the favorable turn of Fortune’s wheel,” wrote the authors of “History of the Pacific Northwest,” published in 1889 by the North Pacific Company of Portland, Ore.
A staunch Republican, Cathcart was elected to two terms as county treasurer and also served as a Snohomish city councilman.
In 1876, he married Julia Johns of Seattle. The couple had two sons and two daughters, according to “History of Washington,” edited by Julian Hawthorne in 1893.
Years later, he was accused of firing a shotgun at one of his sons in order to “get even” after an argument over the signing of some legal papers. The shots were fired from about 100 yards, and no one was injured.
His son refused to press charges.
Some of his wealth was wiped out during an economic depression in the late 1890s. Still, he managed to hold on to much of his farmland and timber holdings. He died in 1909 of blood poisoning.
Reporter David Chircop: 425-339-3429 or dchircop@heraldnet.com.
