booth gardner - Washington Secretary of State

in 1874 and served from 1875-1881. Mary Booth was one of Seattle’s most active charity
volunteers. Their son entered the University of Washington in 1873 when he was 12 years
old. The governor’s grandfather was extremely bright, but the feat was not as prodigious
as you might think. Seattle pioneer Arthur Denny, the speaker of the House, pushed
construction of a territorial university in Seattle
long before there was a ready supply of high
school graduates eager for higher education.
The university in Laurence Booth’s day was a
shoestring operation largely resigned to teaching
grades six through 12.
Young Booth joined his father in the
Auditor’s Office in 1875 at the age of 14. By
1879 he was a deputy auditor and remained
with the office for 12 years, buying and selling
land on the side. In 1887, Booth and Edwin S.
Briscoe launched an abstract and title business,
purchasing “the first set of books for the King
County land titles ever compiled.” Booth had
joined the Washington National Guard in 1884
and rose through the ranks to commander of
Company B of the First Regiment. An excellent
athlete, he was a member of Seattle’s first
amateur baseball team, the Alkis. His most
famous exploit found him on the front lines of Seattle’s baptism by fire.
* * *
It hadn’t rained in weeks and Seattle was savoring a storybook spring. The business
district was bustling. Some 27,000 newcomers had arrived in the past decade, boosting
the population to nearly 31,000. One was John E. Back, 24, a stubby Swede who left the
old country in 1887, made his way to Seattle a year later and found a job in a cabinet shop
along the waterfront. John was a good worker but by most accounts not very bright.
It was June 6, 1889, and things turned bad around half past 2. “I cut some balls of
glue and put them in the glue pot on the stove,” the carpenter told a Post-Intelligencer
reporter the next day in his broken English. “I put in some shaving where there was
little fire, and then went to work about 25 feet away, near the front door. After a while,
somebody said, ‘Look at the glue!’ ” The pot had boiled over, spewing flaming globs onto
the floor. “Then I run and took the pot of water to smother the fire.” A co-worker shouted
“No!” But it was too late. “When I throw the water on,” Back said, “the glue flew all over
the shop into the shavings and everything take fire.”
“Everything take fire” neatly sums up the next 11 hours. The floor was covered with
11
Laurence S. Booth, the governor’s grandfather, as a young
businessman in Seattle. University of Washington Libraries,
Special Collections, UW21791.