North Tacoma Shingle Co. (1898-1900)

intro needed

Before Fred Johnson and the Hagberg Brothers built Pacific Shingle Co. they had teamed up with Hoken Lundgren (and Peter and John Peterson) to build this mill, which was at the foot of (what is today) Washington Street. The site chosen was already occupied by a building constructed years earlier as a slaughter house and run by Levi. E. West. By 1898, Mr. West had moved to Puyallup Ave. and the old slaughter house building was converted into the shingle mill. In September 1900, when only two years old, the mill was totally lost to a fire.

 It was evident that during the 1880s and 90s, mills far down the shoreline from Old Town were “sitting ducks” for fire as they could not be reached by fire equipment and there was not yet a fire boat. Shoreline merchants were getting concerned about fires. The Tacoma Tug & Barge Co. had placed an order in early 1900 with the Crawford & Reid Ship Building Firm (located in Old Town) to build the tug “Fearless”. It was to include equipment for pumping 1000 gallons of water a minute from eight hoses. Ironically, it was not finished until October of 1900—one month too late to help save the No. Tacoma Shingle Co. The main job of the Fearless was to be an on-call tug all around the sound—and not be moored as a fireboat. It did save many mill dry kiln fires over the years, but unfortunately it seemed to be off doing a job somewhere else whenever a big mill fire occurred.

With the demise of No. Tacoma Shingle Co., the owners split up and moved closer to Old Town to build mills: the Johnson/Hagberg team formed Pacific Shingle Co. while Lundgren built Tacoma Cedar Co.

Nerheim, J. N.. The History of Lumber Mills in Old Town. Tacoma, WA. Self-published, 2004.