1,066,682,851
About seven million feet was dressed lumber. The value of this product for this one year was $12,800,284. The larger mills own a fleet of vessels, but aside from these hundreds of vessels come here to load. Statistics from eight Puget Sound mills show that four hundred and two cargoes sailed from their docks in* 1889. Port Madison and Pacific mills furnished no list of vessels, but they probably loaded another hundred. These cargoes go to the ports of California. Mexico, Central America, Hawaii, Peru, Chili, Australia, Brazil, China, and Great Britain. . The Port Blakely mill filled one order from Cardiff, England, for one million feet in timbers sixteen by sixteen inches square and sixty-one feet long, and twenty-four inches square and ninety feet long. The value of this cargo was seventeen thousand dollars.
Let us, then, go to see Port Blakely. It lies ten miles west of Seattle on the southern end of Bainbridge Island, and is owned by Captain W. H. Benton and associates. Most of the great milling establishments of Puget Sound were founded about 1852-53, when the devastating fires of San Francisco's early history suggested the need of lumber manufacture. Benton was one of the many sea-captains—chiefly Maine men—who saw their ideal haven in Puget Sound. It is related that in 1851 Dr. Samuel Merritt, of San Francisco, sent a vessel, of which he was owner, to these northern waters for ice. When the vessel returned, the captain surprised the doctor by saying as soon as they met, "Why, doctor, water don't freeze in Puget Sound!" This was a revelation, and many a sea-going man from the coast of Hew England, looking at the waters which never froze and the limitless forests, determined to stick his stake there.
And so it fell out that, in 1853, Captain Benton joined C. C. Terry on Alki Point in erecting a mill, which they afterwards removed to Port Orchard, and subsequently sold. Benton then went to Port Blakely, and with a partner named Howard erected in 1864 an establishment costing eighty thousand dollars, and which would cut fifty thousand feet a da}\ In 1880 its capacity was increased to two hundred thousand feet per diem of twelve hours. It now cuts three hundred thousand, and could add another one hundred thousand, having a great number of saws,
