At Home in King County: Images from the Collections

Health, safety, recreation and transportation are some of the topics that appear in these photographs. Please click on the thumbnails at the right for larger images and descriptive text. Links in the captions lead to other pages that are part of the King County Archives Web site. There, you'll find more photographs, maps, drawings and additional text information.

This online exhibit, prepared in honor of Washington State Archives Month 2008 (external link), is based on a display ("A Baker's Dozen: Images of King County from the Collections") originally created in 2003 by Assistant Archivist Helice Koffler.

Hoovervilles and hogs

Two stories from Seattle's history are reflected in this photograph, taken February 6, 1933. In the foreground is part of one of Seattle's several "Hoovervilles,” this one along the railroad tracks near Sixth Avenue South and South Holgate Street. During the Great Depression, encampments of displaced people sprang up in metropolitan areas throughout the United States. These settlements were known as "Hoovervilles," mockingly invoking President Herbert Hoover's failed economic policies. In the background, the sign for "Wild Rose Lard" identifies the Frye and Company meat-packing plant at 2203 Airport Way. Ten years later, that building would become the site of one of Seattle's worst disasters when, on February 18, 1943, a prototype Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber on a test flight crashed into the building. Thirty-one lives were lost in the crash and subsequent fire, as were eighty live hogs. Contemporary newspaper clippings relating to the Frye disaster were collected in scrapbooks kept by the county coroner and retained by the King County Archives.

Seattle-King County Department of Public Health photograph files (Series 275), Box 1. (Photo ID 90.2.0688)