EVERETT — Those who live in the Northwest Neighborhood should find a little surprise on their doorsteps this morning.
Volunteers plan to deliver a color line-drawn map of early Everett to every front porch — weather permitting.
The maps, reprints of a lithograph produced by the Brown Engineering Co. in 1893, show the sparsely populated streets of Everett of the time.
This was the Northwest Neighborhood Association’s way of saying thanks, said chairman Paul Donovan.
He first got the idea five years ago when he saw a copy of the map in the window of a Snohomish County museum.
“That’s such a cool map,” he remembers thinking. “There’s not a lot of communities that get a glimpse of what they looked like at the very, very beginning.”
The museum had only one copy and Donovan had to beg an original copy to reproduce from historian David Dilgard at the Everett Library.
The maps feature a bird’s-eye view of the city, as if the artist were floating above Port Gardner with his pad and pencils. Most of what is now north Everett is depicted as undeveloped. A grid of streets abruptly ends in masses of trees. A smattering of industrial operations belch smoke at the end of docks and along the river. The edges of the city fade into farmland and then the Cascade Range to the east.
A map key pinpoints important places of the time. A few of the most prominent places are shown along the edge of the map in insets: the residence of Sen. J.E. McManus, Neff and Mish Shingle Mill, and Everett National Bank on Hewitt Avenue.
A carefully handwritten description of the city on the map broadly boasts such facts as the three transcontinental railroads that converge in town, the 15 miles of graded roadways and “the electric lights placed on all the principal streets.”
The company that produced the lithograph actually built many of the streets on Everett’s east side, Dilgard said.
A great deal of care was taken rendering accurate depictions of these early Everett buildings, he said. However, some buildings shown as finished on the map were actually still in the planning stages.
Dilgard called the map “an amazing lens through which the details of early Everett, both lost and extant, can be studied and enjoyed.”
The neighborhood association paid for the maps from donations of its members. K&H Printing and AdPro Litho both helped reprint 1,750 of the maps at cost, and each was wrapped in brown paper and tied with ribbon.
As of Friday, the maps were stacked in a 4-foot-tall pyramid in Donovan’s garage.
“I haven’t framed mine yet,” he said. “I’m waiting to make sure everybody else gets theirs first.”
Debra Smith: 425-339-3197, dsmith@heraldnet.com.
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