booth gardner - Washington Secretary of State

to soak the smoking roof, which was being bombarded by cinders. “Clerks were hastily
bundling records into baskets and sacks and carrying them up the hill,” Morgan wrote. The
jailers, meantime, herded their shackled prisoners out of harm’s way. “We got a ladder
from somewhere,” the judge told reporters, “but it was too short to reach the eaves of the
building. It was long enough, however, so that if some of us held it perpendicular, an agile
fellow could reach from the top end to the roof and pull himself up.”
Larry Booth was that agile fellow, and a brave one, too. In a scene that resembled
a circus stunt, two men steadied
the ladder as best they could as he
stood tippy-toe on the top rung,
stretched to grasp the overhanging
eaves and pulled himself up and
over onto the roof. Judge Hanford,
Crawford and others on the
ground formed a bucket brigade
from a faucet to the flagstaff.
“We used the halyards on the
flagstaff to haul buckets of water
up to him,” the judge said. “He
dashed the water on the roof” and
poured water down the sides of
the building. The Courthouse was saved. Booth’s feat inspired other bucket brigades and
several homes were also spared.
The last flames were extinguished around 3 a.m. When the sun rose on June 7, 1889,
Seattle was 29 square blocks of smoldering rubble. Miraculously, no lives were lost – except
for an estimated one million rats. As was the case with many other blooming Western
towns of the era, Seattle’s great fire was also a blessing in disguise. New building codes
were adopted, mandating brick construction in the central business district. A professional
fire department was established, together with a municipal water supply system.
Booth’s children and grandchildren often asked him to tell the story of the day Seattle
burned, especially the part about climbing onto the Courthouse roof. His father-in-law and
brother-in-law told it, too. On April 12, 1893, Booth married Nelle Crawford, the court crier’s
fetching 17-year-old sister. Ronald C. Crawford, the father of the bride, was much impressed
with young Booth – so much so that he swallowed deep and smiled thinly when his friends
asked how the only surviving charter member of the first Masonic lodge on the West Coast
could countenance the marriage of his daughter to a staunch Roman Catholic.
King County Courthouse in 1885. University of Washington Libraries, Special
Collections, A. Curtis 25167.
* * *
Booth Gardner’s maternal grandparents picked a bad year to be married. The
“Panic of ’93” was the worst depression America had seen. The title company survived,
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