million feet annually. Forty acres were purchased at the head of Commencement Bay, and costly improvements made, thereby setting the example of utilizing the tide-flats for business purposes, an example which was quickly followed by other companies. The St. Paul mill now furnishes employment to four hundred men, besides three hundred in the logging-camps and as many more on contract work in the city. It manufactures about five million feet of lumber per month, nearly half of which is sold in Tacoma, the other half going east by rail or being shipped by vessels for a sea-voyage.
The Commencement Bay Land and Improvement Company is a local one, which, seeing the value of the flats in the east end of the Bay, have purchased and are constructing upon them wharves, warehouses, and manufactories,—so quickly does one act of development inaugurate a second.
But I had begun to say that not all the money expended here in building up a model city comes from the East, and these improvements in the harbor remind me to go back to my theme. It is, after all, only by taking account of Tacoma's exports that we begin to understand how the money is to come back which is expended here.
Lumber has always been and must remain one of the principal articles of export from Puget Sound ports. The St. Paul and Tacoma, Pacific Mill, Tacoma Mill (at old town), and the Gig Harbor Mill, together manufacture two hundred million feet of lumber annually, the exported portion of which output is valued at nearly nine hundred thousand dollars. The export of coal from this port is yet in its infancy, but in 1888, during a coal famine in California owing to an avoidance of the port of San Francisco by vessels which usually bring coal in ballast, there were shipped from Tacoma seventy eight cargoes, or two hundred and sixty-eight thousand tons, of coal, valued at one million four hundred and seventy-four thousand dollars. Fifty of these cargoes were Carbon Hill coal, which mine is the property of the Southern Pacific Eailroad of California, while the South Prairie Mines in the Puyallup Valley and the Bucoda Mines of Thurston County furnished the remainder, with the exception of one cargo of Durham coal.
The Eoslyn Mines, on the line of the Northern Pacific, which
